


Nose to Nose

by Locksnek



Category: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, SkekGra POV sorry too self-indulgent for UrGoh POV, SkekGra drops the F bomb like it's going out of fashion, and I want to do well by it, come for the witty dialogue stay for the pathos, hi sorry I've not updated this I promise it's not abandoned, just v hard to focus on it with everything going on, these 2 poor bastards ended a years-long writer's block for me!, yeah this is shippy af now but my style is mostly fade to black
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 56,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Locksnek/pseuds/Locksnek
Summary: SkekGra and UrGoh's first project together, getting their people on board with their unification kick, goes quite amiss. Fortunately, they now have all the time in the world for other projects, such as mental anguish, emotional conflictedness, and substance abuse._ Summary update - This fic is moving into Age of Resistance era now and will extend beyond that (consider the possibly bracing ramifications).  It's also getting more Skeksis-centric with a bunch of flashbacks.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to update in the near future with the distressing state of the world, but it's definitely not abandoned.
Relationships: skekGra/urGoh (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 113
Kudos: 54





	1. A Nail in the Head is Worth Two--

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How the nail came to be where it now is.

After things have settled and UrGoh has mixed dyes from gathered materials and procured a rough bolt of cloth by trading stories for it at the nearest encampment, SkekGra takes to wearing white. It is both in defiance of the Skeksis, who garb is relentlessly dark, and in some sidelong acknowledgment of his own light (UrGoh’s light?). He makes crimson designs on the robes, perhaps to atone for the blood he has let and perhaps to indicate–not without a certain satisfying sense of martyrdom–that his own recently-enlightened blood has been viciously let by his own people. This, and more, must all have been revolving in the semi-conscious of his frayed brain, though the clothes are fashioned without much thought and more on instinct.

<>-<>-<>

The first talk not gone well. They’d debated at length whether to approach each people, UrRu and Skeksis, separately or together. There was much to be said for undertaking the task apart, each to his own kind; neither group was likely to take well to a counterpart being bought among them. However, there was also much to be said for going together, first to the UrRu and then to the Skeksis. After all, what better proof was there of the feasibility and desirability of unity than SkekGra and UrGoh appearing together for all to witness?

Naturally, they would plead their case to the Mystics first, as those beings were slow to anger and action. Approaching the volatile Skeksis first would come to nothing, both knew. However, if the UrRu could be convinced or at least made to think, it might be that their collective contemplation would influence the mood in the Castle of the Crystal.

SkekGra was profoundly uncomfortable among the UrRu. He couldn’t tell if it was fear, shame, or contempt that laid hold of him and tried to set his tail and all six of his limbs quivering with tension. Shit, they looked so placid and stupid, they looked like cud-chewers that were quite beneath his notice. Only UrGoh, somehow, didn’t look like that–although of course, he did look just like that, but SkekGra might a bit biased in his favor since he liked UrGoh. Or rather, he _supposed_ he liked UrGoh, if “liked” was even the right word. Truly, he was still a bit put off by his Mystic counterpart, and their interactions were often tense and somewhat formal even though they both subscribed to the same vision and had increasingly sought each other’s company. Whatever the case, UrGoh was the only tolerable one among them. SkekGra tried to put that sentiment aside as the UrRu shuffled into a half-circle around himself and UrGoh; showing his feelings would be counterproductive. The Skeksis, surrounded by those whom his own people had proclaimed parasites and enemies long ago, did not know how to behave. He was accustomed to the showy inflections and large stage gestures of his folk, to the ever-shifting but ever-present hierarchy that demanded constant attention. Should he comport himself with the dignity befitting one of high rank, before these odd people? Should he attempt to show submission? SkekGra was at a loss, especially when he noted the keen watchfulness and quiet intelligence in the eyes of the foolish-looking Mystics, so he tried to stand still a neutral stance and let UrGoh do most of the talking. 

A fat lot of good any of it did. The UrRu heard them out and questioned them at mind-bendingly slow leisure while all three suns rose and fell, and the first had risen again before they were finally dismissed. They were dismissed gently but implacably. The UrRu were happy as they were; a balance had been established; why disturb that balance, when Mystics and Skeksis both kept to themselves and were pleased with the way they lived?

“That was probably me,” said SkekGra as they set up camp just outside the valley, ready to sleep after their ordeal. “They didn’t like me very much, did they?”

UrRu shrugged in an unhurried motion, in contrast to the frenetic movements with which SkekGra was laying out his bedroll, and made a noncommittal gentle grumble: “Neh.”

“Neh?” SkeGra felt the thick mane of downy feathers on his neck bristle in irritation. “Neh?! What the shard does that even mean? Yes, or no? Fuck!”

“They wouldn’t like any Skeksis,” came the reply, articulated so slowly that SkekGra wanted to wring the UrRu’s neck.

“Fair enough. I doubt the Emperor and company will care much for you either, UrGoh.”

The remark was unnecessary, but UrGoh, still just half finished situating his own bedroll, only cast SkekGra a long-suffering look. “Yeah. Are we still going to see them?”

The Skeksis flopped down on his meagre bed and yanked the blanket over himself, only his beak sticking out. “Yeah. Sure. What else are we going to do?“

<><><>

The Skeksis, ranged out along the massive table with their ever-present snacks and baubles, finally given free rein to fully unleash the muttered contempt and consternation that the Emperor had kept at bay during the entire ten minutes SkekGra had been given to explain himself (to explain themselves), erupted in a cacophony of pearl-clutching and snarls for blood.

“Traitor!”

“He’s lost his mind, sedate him!”

“Take his eyes!”

“Take his tongue!”

“Remove the Mystic, why did we allow him in here? He’s a parasite and he’s clearly infected our esteemed Conqueror’s mind,” squawked SkekOk, standing up to draw attention to his remark amidst the louder bellows.

“Ah!” SkekTek joined in, also rising. “Listen to the Scroll-Keeper! SkekGra brought this parasitic life-form into the castle, and we allowed it due to his standing. Clearly the Mystic’s influence is…”

The Chamberlain stood up as well. “Emperor! Let Skeksis listen to clever Scientist, mmhhmmm?”

The Emperor nodded and gestured vaguely at the rest to quiet themselves. “SkekTek, you seem eager to share some insight with us?”

SkekGra, suddenly finding himself just as uncertain of how to comport himself among the Skeksis as he’d been among the UrRu, glanced at UrGoh. His UrRu stood stoically beside him, but SkekGra could sense his fear and agitation (or was that his own?). SkekTek, meanwhile, seemed to inflate a bit; he bowed to the Emperor and nodded smugly to SkekSil in token of one of this likely short-lived alliance. As SkekTek began to speak, SkekGra couldn’t control the bristling of his ruff.

“This UrRu is a parasite,” the Scientist declaimed, “not of the body, but of the mind. This is precisely why we remain separate from these creatures since the Crystal fractured. They warp our minds. They are a danger to all Skeksis. We should never have allowed the parasite to enter our presence, especially–”

“His name is UrGoh,” barked SkekGra, surprising himself. Someone threw a wine glass at him, which he ducked. The glass shattered in the silence, but the silence was sharper than the broken shards that lay on the floor to his left.

“SkekGra,” the Emperor said softly, almost as slowly as UrGoh himself might have spoken, and the Conqueror felt bile rising in his throat. Of course it was normal to be a bit uneasy around the Emperor, but had he ever been so frightened of him? He swallowed painfully. SkekSo concluded, “Don’t interrupt. You have done enough already. Scientist, proceed.”

SkekTek tilted his head at SkekGra, with a glint in his eye the latter didn’t care for at all, and continued. “We oughtn’t have allowed SkekGra to bring a parasite into our midst, before the very Emperor himself. But, seeing as it’s already done, we should seize advantage of the circumstances. They claim Skeksis are still connected with UrRu, still two parts of one selfsame being. So, let us test that! Let us see how actions taken upon one affect the other.”

“No,” SkekGra mumbled, surprised to hear the uncharacteristic tone of fear and resignation in his own voice. He might have known it would pan out like this. What had he expected? Had he thought that, if they punished him, they would let UrGoh go? Had he thought, even, that they might actually listen? He stepped closer to UrGoh, who was glancing along the table with an equally uncharacteristic look of alarm. 

The assembly shrieked its approval of the Scientist’s idea and eagerly threw out suggestions for the “experiment.”

“Hold it,” SkekUng yelled, forcefully enough to command a moment’s silence. “Is this an experiment, or a punishment? We have yet to conclude if SkekGra is guilty, Emperor.”

“At least,” wheedled SkekSil, “Conqueror is guilty of bringing in Mystic parasite, of telling Skeksis we should give up our happy life and merge with UrRu for the sake of obsolete being. Guilty of insulting Skeksis!”

“That is true,” nodded SkekSo. For fuck’s sake, thought SkekGra, disgusted all at once and feeling as though he were seeing the Emperor with new eyes (UrGoh’s?), how did someone with such a scrawny neck manage to look so overbearing? The Emperor’s twiggy neck and twiggy arms stuck out of his black robes and ruffles pathetically, yet he was positively terrifying. “A penalty is in order for the rash and irreverent actions the Conqueror has taken. He is clearly guilty of at least that much.”

SkekSil, evidently sensing he was being called upon to finish the thought, assumed a self-important posture and looked from SkekSo to UrGoh to SkekGra. “But does Conqueror recant? Or–is Conqueror now _Heretic_?”

“Heretic,” someone giggled, and a few other voices took up the word more virulently.

SkekGra looked to UrGoh again. This whole thing felt utterly surreal. UrGoh now looked like safety, whereas his own people looked and sounded terrible and alien. He swayed a bit with fear, and, oddly, a sense of grief that he had never felt (not quite so, not felt since the Crystal broke and he saw that face for the first time and those eyes, his own eyes but not his, meeting his with equal grief and confusion). Then SkekGra was flooded with righteous ire. He drew himself back up to his full height, bristling openly, and hollered at the rest of them:

“Am I not Skeksis? Do I not have an equal voice among you? Who are you to dictate the truth to us?” (To “us”?) “I speak as one of you–One you heaped honors on and groveled to, no less! If having a new fucking idea for the first time in three hundred trine makes someone a heretic around here, well, then yes, I am a heretic!”

The grand table burst into jeering and hollering again. There were calls to yank his teeth, take his claws, remove his eyelids. Dinnerware and food, some of the food still squirming, sailed at him. Something with snapping pinchers hit UrGoh’s cheek. SkegGra felt it and snarled. These creatures were pathetic, irrational, so eager to turn on one another. Had he never seen before how utterly grotesque they were (he was)?

SkekSo bellowed for silence, rose, and came to stand before SkekGra. “You have said it. Do you brand yourself Heretic, SkekGra? Or will you recant?”

SkekGra took another sidestep closer to the UrRu, his eye’s not leaving the Emperor’s. “I do not recant.”

Profound wrath seeped from SkekSo’s glare, but he paused for a long moment, reflecting most likely on the pragmatic and logistical issues that would ensue from losing a Conqueror. Then he made a decisive downward gesture with one long, emaciated hand. “As you like. The consequences will be severe.”

The Skeksis were never able to hold their silence for long. Above the resumed clatter, the Collector’s voice shrieked, “Kill him!” “Kill him,” the General concurred, and a hush fell. They looked around at each other and whispered, in unease or bloodlust or both. The first law they’d instituted, after the one about segregating themselves from the Mystics, had been that Skeksis must never kill Skeksis.

The Emperor paused even longer this time before hollering “Shut up!” into the silence. “Idiots. He is Skeksis. We do not kill Skeksis.”

“Kill Mystic, maybe, sire,” Chamberlain suggested rather boldly. “Then Heretic will die, too.”

“That’s the same damn thing, you fool,” the Scroll Keeper snapped, then shrank down at once in his chair as he realized what his words implied–that Skeksis and UrRu were, in fact, one and the same. The Collector put a restraining hand on SkekOk’s shoulder, though the latter was already cowed and trembling.

“I will gut you and paint this castle with your entrails, every last one of you,” the Heretic found himself seething. It was one thing to suggest they kill him, but to kill UrGoh? Of course SkekOk was right, it amounted to the same, but– “We made a pact with the UrRu, they do not kill us and we do not kill them. You bloody cowards, afraid of–of _him_?”

“Neither of you are worth our fear. You’re parasites. Pollutants,” snapped the Scientist.

“Enough.” SkekSo turned his back on SkekGra and began circling back around the table to his seat at the center. “It is true. You pollute our dwelling with your heresy, SkekGra. Skeksis do not kill Skeksis. Skeksis do not kill UrRu. You will be exiled, and take your damned Mystic with you.”

“Exiled,” a multiple voices murmured discordantly, some amused, some dissatisfied. SkekGra glanced at the UrRu, who actually had the nerve to shrug as though this were a stroll in the forest. Well, UrGoh was not the one being exiled. UrGoh could walk out of this castle and go back to his stupid, placid life in the valley. The Heretic stood paralyzed with contempt and a novel sense of despair. The calls for punishment arose again.

“Of course, you will be suitably punished,” SkekSo appended as he re-seated himself. 

“Well, naturally,” SkekGra belted out sarcastically, attempting to steel himself. He started to glare at UrGoh, who was going to suffer none of this nonsense. The Mystics punished UrGoh with no more than disapproval. It was unjust, it was–

He saw the look on UrGoh’s face. Of course, UrGoh was going to suffer every bit of it. The Heretic deflated. If UrGoh could put some distance between them, that would at least make it easier on him (him both). “Let the Mystic leave first,” SkekGra said, dimly amazed at the note of supplication in his voice.

Jeering laughter answered him, as one might have expected it should from such folk. “Punish the Mystic, too, he had the nerve to waltz in here when we had a pact to leave each other alone,” opined SkekAyuk.

“No! I talked him into it! This is my doing.” SkekGra hastened toward the table, as shocked as anyone to discover himself starting to sink into a pleading crouch before SkekSo.

“Pathetic,” someone sneered, to general agreement. “MmmMMMM,” the Chamberlain contributed, gratingly.

Behind the Heretic, UrGoh rose his voice for the first time in SkekGra’s acquaintance with him, stopping him in his tracks. “He’s lying. It was my idea.”

SkekGra whirled on him, forgetting everyone else present. “Shut the fuck up!” UrGoh regarded him with a deep sadness in his eyes, but smirked. The low-slung, snouty bastard actually _smirked_.

The Ornamentalist clapped his talons in delight at the drama. “Oh, but this is quaint!”

The Emperor’s voice took on a decisive clip. “All right. The Ornamentalist wants pathos, the Scientist wants an experiment, and we all want you to pay before we wash our claws of you, SkekGra. The Mystic will stay right here while the penalty is administered. Let us witness this unity of yours.”

“Run, UrGoh,” SkekGra screeched stupidly, which of course UrGoh didn’t and would have moved too slowly to do even if he’d wanted to. The Skeksis converged on the Heretic swiftly, some restraining him and others tearing away his clothes and adornments as he lashed out with talons and teeth and words. He was vaguely aware of an enthusiastic debate about what the punishment-experiment ought to be, which continued above his head as they at last subdued him enough to push him to the floor. The claws of his fellows, and broken glass from the dinnerware hurled at him earlier, cut into him. Amid the flurry of robes and beaks, he caught occasional glimpses of UrGoh watching him with a sad and frightened expression. The Skeksis cheered as they decided on some punishment or other, something SkekTek suggested that he couldn’t quite hear, and then the Scientist and a couple others scurried off.

SkekGra was still lashing out feebly, uselessly against the General’s foot on his neck and several others holding his limbs down, when they returned with a heavy block of wood, a few vices, and a sack that clattered as though filled with tools or hardware. They secured his head to the block with the vices. It pinched terribly, he felt as though his skull and face might explode, but he knew the cruel restraints would soon be the least of his worries. They bound his hands and feet behind his back for good measure, then fell away, looming in a circle above him.

The circle parted enough for UrGoh to shuffle into it, then closed in again. The Skeksis seemed completely unconcerned about his presence. Strange. In that instant, they all seemed to understand UrGoh better than SkekGra did. “No, no don’t watch,” groaned SkekGra. UrGoh settled down on his belly, right in front of him, their noses practically touching. 

<>-<>-<>

When the Crystal broke, there was a terrible sense of coming into being newly formed yet newly destroyed. There was no memory, only the strangling sense of eons’ worth of knowledge and experience. SkekGra screamed and screamed, as everyone else seemed to be doing. He could barely comprehend anything happening around him, the only tangible thing being his terror and anguish, until he saw that he was staring at himself–Wait, not himself, he was staring at some hideous _thing_ with a long soft snout and a hide like worn-out velveteen, and this thing had robbed him of–of something–and he despised the creature. He was terrified of it. He needed it, it had stolen his eyes, except that wasn’t so because it was he who had robbed it, he adored it and he must have done something very wrong to it. How could he fix this? Such an awful, ugly, innocent creature. SkekGra could do nothing but stare at it, nose to nose, and it stared back at him. He couldn’t even blink. The noises around him indicated that some of the others had started physical altercations or were making loud, aggrieved noises at each other. But he couldn’t move, all he could do was stare. They stared silently and did not stir until someone else, maybe one of his ilk or maybe one of the other’s, intervened somehow–dragged the other one away or drove it away, or dragged him away–SkekGra does not remember the details. He remembers only the unbearable eyes, and the unbearable parting.

<>-<>-<>

They took an imposing mallet from the sack, and a nail to match. SkekGra fought back panic. He had maimed and killed, surely he could handle whatever this was. But UrGoh was watching him, his damnable steadfast face right there, oblivious to the Skeksis stepping over his tail as SkekUng and SkekTek milled about preparing. Maybe this, SkekGra could not handle.

“UrGoh,” he whispered hoarsely. “ _Please._ Look away.” 

“Don’t touch the end of the nail, you lout, I just sterilized it,” SkekTek admonished SkekUng, while UrGoh quietly kept looking at SkekGra.

“So?”

“So it needs to be sterile, SkekUng, I _told_ you. Am I the only one around here who understands the concept of infection? We can’t kill him.” Grumbling, SkekTek hunkered down on SkekGra’s left, by his shoulder, and seemed to forget his irritation as he prodded lightly around the top of the Heretic’s head. The Scientist hummed to himself, reveling in his cleverness. A blade scraped against SkekGra’s head, removing a small patch of feathers. “All right,” SkekTek murmured in a voice of intense concentration, a tone that was chilling given the circumstances, “Right here.” A small, cool dab of something, ink maybe, near the middle of the shaven patch. 

Understanding visited SkekGra. “No. No, don’t–Take an eye, an arm, don’t–”

The Skeksis laughed, being the contemptible creatures they were. Why did it take _this_ for him to see them for what they were?

“You invited this, SkekGra.” The Emperor came into view, looking dispassionately down on him. “Despite your vile words, heretical ideas, and your unmitigated arrogance in bringing a Mystic among us, you were given a chance to recant. You had to have known what would happen.”

“I did not ask for–for this!” SkekGra rasped out. He could barely breathe for the crushing fear. They could do worse than kill him, they could pierce his mind and take away everything he was.

SkekSil appeared next to the Emperor, flashing a benevolent smile. The two Skeksis flanked UrGoh, all three seemingly oblivious to their proximity. “Heretic needs not worry. Scientist is very clever, has studied brains of animals. He makes sure you do not forget yourself. Memory will not be damaged. We _want_ you to remember, remember everything.”

“There may be other side effects,” SkekTek added, still on SkekGra’s left and slightly behind his head. “Random pains, discombobulation…I’d say you might go insane, but you’ve already done that.”

At least he wouldn’t lose himself, if SkekTek did know what he was doing. SkekGra couldn’t bear the thought of his own mind leaving him, of losing himself and UrGoh losing himself too, losing themself. “UrGoh,” he tried again, but the stubborn face would not turn away.

“We’re very interested, too, to see how this affects your _friend_.” SkekTek sounded positively brimming with glee.

Now SkekUng was on his right, also slightly behind his head. The cold point of the nail came into contact with his newly bald spot and rested there, awaiting its duty. “Please,” SkekGra whispered, involuntary, more to UrGoh than to the Skeksis.

“Awww,” someone sneered.

SkekSo motioned for silence. “Heretic, after the punishment is administered, you are banished forthwith. Go wander off into the desert, move freely about there with your ravings, but don’t set one talon outside the sand while you still breathe. Skeksis do not kill Skeksis, but if you refuse to abide by the terms of your exile, you’ll have shown us once and for all that you are no longer one of us. If we find you in violation of our will, we won’t hesitate to kill you as slowly as circumstances might permit.”

A pause ensued and SkekGra saw that he was being given a chance to speak. He considered, grappling with his dread and with his grief over what this would do to UrGoh–to UrGoh! The Emperor was right, in a way. He was more concerned with UrGoh, now, than he was with the Skeksis. The Heretic strained against the vices, but couldn’t raise his head a millimeter. He drew a long, slow breath, the last before the world split open. “Fuck you.”

The excruciating cracking and rending came not once, but four times, the nail driven in slowly and exactingly. He screamed, nose to nose with UrGoh, whose eyes never left his. UrGoh screamed. He could barely comprehend anything happening around him, the only tangible thing being his terror and anguish, and watching himself scream.

<>-<>-<>

Aside from the obviously traumatic bit, what really haunts him about that ordeal was the way the Skeksis parted to let UrGoh into the circle, allowed him to approach, stepped over him carelessly, ignored him as though he were as inconsequential as a crawlie; the way they _knew_ UrGoh would not fight.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra found himself stumbling along the corridors, half dragged by SkekUng, with several of the others in attendance. He didn’t know if he’d lost consciousness, and, if so, for how long. He only recalled the rending, and now this walking. His head pounded, sending blinding knives of light into his eyeballs, and pain zipped up and down his limbs as though he were held in the grip of striking lightning. UrGoh, who was in similar if lesser pain, was somehow managing to trundle along beside him unaided. 

Good thing UrGoh could manage on his own. SkekGra could barely see or hear in his state, but he could feel keenly that the Skeksis were afraid to touch the Mystic. He wanted to sneer at the cowards, but it was all he could do not to throw up.

They dragged him out of the castle and over one of its extensive fanged bridges, dumping him on the ground a few paces beyond the bridge’s terminus and leaving him without another word. He lay where he’d been deposited. It was cold, but a bit of warmth radiated against his right flank where UrGoh had lain down beside him. The end of the other’s nose touched his beak, very lightly. When he sat up at last, almost passing out and groaning at the pain that thundered through him, UrGoh sat up too. Still saying nothing, the UrRu took off his cloak and draped it over SkekGra’s bare shoulders, adjusting it with his four arms. Curious, how most of the Skeksis couldn’t even use their other pair. Why had they let half their arms atrophy? That was quite stupid, the Heretic reflected vaguely: Skeksis were really quite fucking stupid. How useful, to have four arms. Something like a bemused smile almost visited SkekGra’s face, but pain flashed from the roots of his teeth up into his scalp. He winced, and UrGoh put one pair of hands on his shoulders and regarded him quietly again for a long time, nose to nose.

“I don’t think they liked me very much,” UrGoh said after a time.

“Yeah,” said SkekGra.

They gained their feet, ungracefully, and limped slowly down the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No I don't know what the chapter title is supposed to mean, but it popped into my head and I couldn't stop cackling like the small but monstrous and deeply disturbed creature I am, so there it stays.


	2. Bird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What they said on the way to the desert.

UrGoh, living up to his epithet of Wanderer, was familiar with the terrain they traversed on their course to the Crystal Desert, and they availed themselves a couple stashes of supplies and preserved food he’d left hidden under rocks or buried in the loam. For some days, SkekGra was barely aware of anything save the interminable trudging, the nail in his head jolting his nervous system with each step. He had to lean on UrGoh for help at all times, often literally, though he couldn’t even bring himself to feel shame or indignation at his plight while the pain and the whole ordeal were still novel. 

“Is this all you eat?” the Skeksis queried a bit plaintively as they made a paltry camp between the roots of a stupendous lichen-encrusted tree.

“Not all. But berries keep well if you prep them right first.”

“No crawlies?”

“Crawlies don’t keep well.”

“That’s why you eat them alive, silly.” The Heretic eyed a ten-legged mantid-like animal the size of his hand as it hurried up the flank of one of the ancient roots. That thing moved very much like he himself did, bustling, efficient, and entirely ungainly. He wondered if that was his own thought, or something from UrGoh. UrGoh too was suffering greatly, though his pain was secondhand; his head occasionally bled in sympathy, but the bone had not broken. The Mystic was far more possessed of his strength, both of mind and body, and had more leisure to ponder his counterpart than the Skeksis did. SkekGra would have liked to try and seize the mantid animal and pop it flailing into his beak, but he had not the strength nor the coordination at present. Would he ever get better, or would he be UrGoh’s burden forever? 

That was assuming UrGoh didn’t just leave him to it once they got to the desert. Really, the Wanderer had no obligation to the Heretic. They had already failed.

“So, you’re proposing I keep menageries of live crawlies at my stashes, and that they will stay put, and that bigger crawlies won’t eat them, until you and your barbaric dining habits happen to pass by?” That was one of the longest speeches UrGoh had deigned to make, and SkekGra was too muddled in his head to care how slowly he spoke. 

“Why yes, that’s exactly what I’m proposing, make me a crawlies menagerie wherever you go. It’s not like you’ve ever done anything else for me.” The Heretic’s vision was strobing again, his heartbeat reaching up into his brain to batter at him. He wasn’t sure if UrGoh was understanding his sarcasm. “No, no,” SkekGra tried again while UrGoh looked at him unreadably, “I mean, you’ve already done enough–you’ve–suffered enough, on my account.” He buried his head in the crook of his arm, sitting propped up against the tree root. “I’m sorry.” Had he ever been “sorry”, for anything, before? 

“Why?” UrGoh sounded genuinely confused.

SkekGra didn’t dare look up. He could feel himself shaking in a different way that wasn’t fear or ire for once. “It’s my fault your head hurts.”

“Pfft. Not half as much as yours does.” There was a shuffling, and he felt UrGoh sit down against the same tree root next to him. “You’ve done nothing to me, other than complain a whole lot. I choose this fate, SkekGra. We choose it together.”

“But I should have known. Why and thrice why would I have thought that the Skeksis would listen to me, let alone me-with-you?”

“You thought so because you are something else now, as am I.”

“What are we? We’re not the--that--UrSkek.” 

“No. We’re none of what we used to be. We have made ourselves new.”

“I don’t feel very new.” SkekGra was wiped of even the strength to support himself against the tree, and slumped slowly over to UrGoh’s shoulder. “I feel decrepit, spit on, irrelevant.”

“You’re new to me!” UrGoh said, with one of those silly flares of enthusiasm. SkekGra could picture the stupid grin on his muzzle, but was too tired to open his eyes. 

“Good of you to say,” the Heretic mumbled. Come to that, he was new to his own self. What was he, bereft of the role he’d occupied among the Skeksis, a position of unusually good standing and rarely-contested power? He was used to being the powerful one in most situations. In fact, he’d probably been, unwittingly, arrogant to presume that he’d had any power to influence UrGoh and to lead UrGoh into harm. UrGoh was a free agent, and had never been anything but SkekGra’s equal. Well, fuck. SkekGra’s first real experience of guilt, and it was born of his own arrogance. He buried his face a bit deeper into his counterpart’s shoulder, feeling somehow warmer toward him but mortified at the thought of looking UrGoh in the face right then. “You’re the better of us.”

“Shut up, SkekGra,” the UrRu said very gently. He leaned his own nose into SkekGra’s ruff, the warmth of his breath stirring the feathers there. “Day is no better than night. They only are.”

They fell asleep like that. SkekGra dreamed of running down endless corridors, going in circles and tripping over shadowy things with hundreds of grasping legs, trying to locate the source of voices so distorted by their own echoes that they resonated through his skull like a landslide.

<>-<>-<>

The Heretic occasionally crawls to the rocky pinnacle high over the roof of the Circle of the Suns, early in the morning or evening when the suns are not too hot and their absence is not too cold. It look the better part of a trine for him to recover enough coordination in his limbs to do so without endangering himself. One cannot really sit at the narrow top of the pinnacle, only cling to it with limbs and tail wrapped over its precipitous edges. A breeze at this dizzying height feels both dangerous and benevolent, like Thra’s breath gusting experimentally over a crawly that it cannot decide what to do with – whether to flick it away, or to observe what it might do next. Let us instead sigh, and leave it to fight or fall as it will. SkekGra does not do much on that lofty perch, to the casual observer. Inside his head, though, he is very busy, trying to untangle what a self is, learning to notice and relinquish the need for control–this, an incessant lesson that needs relearning many times in a day–, trying to put names on feelings that have no names yet in his vocabulary or that once had different names which no longer fit. The nail has tried to insert itself as a physical impediment to his consciousness moving freely as it should within its own brainmeat. The nail cannot be removed, for it would let blood inside his head in retaliation against any attempt to dislodge it, it would scramble elements spared by the Scientist’s careful placement of it, and it would kill himselves both. SkekGra had gone through a particularly trying interlude of quite some unum shortly after they moved into the Circle of the Suns, where he’d constantly felt the nail as a malevolent presence, one that would never allow him to truly escape the Skeksis. “It stands in your way, and it is sharp, but you can do something it cannot,” UrGoh had told him: “You can grow. You can grow around it, as a tree grows around a hatchet left in its trunk.” Sometimes SkekGra can feel the rightness of UrGoh’s parable, and he feels free, perched above the world and far from anyone save his own unfurling self, and they are strong. He tilts his chin up and smiles into the soaring wind.

<>-<>-<>

They’d neared the desert, maybe a day or two out, when SkekGra, though still feeble as a newly whelped fizzgig, felt a bit of strength returning. Considering with a clearer head the fact that he’d been sleeping cuddled up to a damned Mystic for several nights running, he was promptly mortified. Well, to _his_ Mystic, but really, did it matter whose Mystic it was? This was really too vulnerable a way to be comporting oneself. Skeksis did not enjoy being soft or vulnerable. 

You are not Skeksis now, SkekGra reminded himself, but he still distanced himself from UrGoh a bit as they ventured nearer to the glittering sands. He felt some type of way that he didn’t enjoy feeling, regarding this distance, but that wasn’t sufficient to change his mind. After all, he’d been bordering on delirious for days now, and that odd interlude might not be representative of his real self even if he _was_ indeed a new self now in his exile. He wondered if UrGoh would confront him about his change, but the Wanderer remained unflappably self-contained. SkekGra did think he sensed some despondency from his counterpart though, as they made their last camp. They could see pockets of a dreary, sandy land, no more than a few miles away, though the brush and the low, scraggly trees they’d been tramping through all day. 

UrGoh kept to his own side of the cooking fire, preparing dinner with one pair of hands while absently combing his hair with the other pair. SkekGra found himself mesmerized by the constant movement, none of the hands ever still but none getting in each other’s way. It was like witnessing some clockwork figure so well-constructed and perfectly-oiled that its gears and levers proceeded without ever a hitch in their plotted movements. It also made UrGoh seem strangely imposing; the Mystic, though low to the ground and much shorter than SkekGra, was overall a bit larger, and the simultaneous activity of the four arms seemed to double his physical presence. The fire, waking up in the settling dusk, sent light and shadow dancing along the steadily working limbs.

None of the hands faltered as UrGoh’s eyes suddenly came up to catch SkekGra’s. “…Yes?”

Caught off guard, SkekGra blurted out, “You’re beautiful.” 

At that, all of UrGoh’s hands did fall still.

Well, damn SkekGra and his stupid flapping beak. Of all the things he could have said– _And,_ anyway, UrGoh was quite homely; this, SkekGra had concluded a long time ago when they first started crossing paths on their respective ramblings over the face of Thra. To UrGoh, he himself must have appeared ghastly, his beak frequently decked with unwashed gore from whatever little animal he’d eaten uncooked (sometimes uncooked enough so as to be alive when the meal began) while stalking with an unflagging pace over hill and through marsh.

SkekGra attempted to save himself. “That is to say, it’s something special, to have four arms. Most Skeksis don’t. Well, we do, but we don’t use them. I mean, we rendered them useless.” 

Except for SkekMal. SkekGra had experienced the occasional uneasy sensation that the Hunter, with his six functional and terribly strong limbs, was trailing them, just barely out of sight, to ensure the Heretic proceeded straight to the place of his exile without undue sidetracking or delaying. This he hadn’t told UrGoh, and he wasn’t sure if UrGoh suspected.

“Why did Skeksis do that?”

“I–I’ll tell you some other time, I don’t think I have the stomach for it at present.”

UrGoh nodded and resumed work on dinner. The pair of hands that had been combing his hair had folded themselves into his lap. He spoke a bit more quietly than usual. “‘Beautiful’, heh, coming from the who looks like a bird.”

“A _bird._ ” SkekGra bristled before he realized it wasn’t an insult. UrGoh liked birds.

“Yes, like those ones that fly way up on the highest currents of air. But also the fluffy ones on the ground.”

“I fucking beg your pardon, UrGoh. _Fluffy_?” 

“Yeah. All those down feathers on your neck. You’re fluffy. Especially when I piss you off and you puff out like you’re doing now.” UrGoh took dinner, some kind of stringy tuber with herbs, off the coals and looked deliberately away, a mischievous smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Cute fluffy bird.”

“You have a death wish or something, cud-chewer?” SkekGra, seized with a mixed sense of disgust and fondness, leapt across the fire, half playfully and half in earnest. He seized the UrRu by the throat, not enough to hurt, and then found himself in the awkward position of having no idea what to do next. Such scuffles could ensue among the Skeksis in a way that one might have called playful, between what one might have called friends or what one might have called lovers or what one might have called enemies, but nothing Skeksis did exactly applied here. And anyway, now his head was shrieking at him and extending those electrified lashes of pain out along to his extremities, castigating him for leaping across fires as though he were hale and without a giant nail lodged in his brain. He hesitated long enough to make it clear he had no idea what he was doing, then worsened his case by reeling in a near-faint and collapsing against UrGoh’s chest with one hand still on the side of his neck.

The Wanderer took the bizarre interaction in stride, scooping SkekGra up with all four arms and depositing him back on his own side of the campfire on his bedroll. SkekGra felt his consciousness lapsing, while UrGoh settled the blanket over him. UrGoh tucked the blanket under his chin, leaving only his mussed-up grey head and nape sticking out. The Mystic nodded, satisfied that he had won this round, as SkekGra was slipping away too fast to retaliate. 

“A nest for a bird,” said UrGoh, smirking in triumph, but with a very strange soft look in his eyes.

<>-<>-<>

In a dark corner of their cave house when UrGoh isn’t around, SkekGra disrobes and sits in silence, trying to take his brain’s slowly-mustering resistance to the nail’s malice and send that resistance down into his spine, along the nerves that navigate his smaller auxiliary shoulder blades and stray impotently into his atrophied arms. Occasionally the useless limbs twitch ever so slightly, but he never seems to make any real progress. He knows it’s only a flight of fancy, one UrGoh’s riddles and gentle teasing must have stoked, but SkekGra feels sure that if only those poor desiccated arms could be made to function again, they would extend themselves not as taloned hands, but as wings.


	3. A Handful of Berries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When they went into the desert.
> 
> Chapter warning: Brief but graphic description of animal abuse.

UrGoh had been speaking throughout the course of their journey about a place in the desert that would be suitable for an exile’s habitation. It was lofty, secluded, within reasonable proximity of a couple inhabited oases, and the nearest neighbors were superstitious about it and afraid to approach it. SkekGra hadn’t thought about it much until they broke camp for the final time outside the sands. He hadn’t been able to consider the future with any real concern, the present and the recent past being all his pain-wracked consciousness was able to handle. Now he nodded his approval–lightly, to avoid jarring his mind–at UrGoh’s description. “Yes, if the neighbors are Dousan they’d better be afraid of it. I can’t have Gelfling meddling in my affairs.”

UrGoh, stuffing supplies meticulously into his pack, raised a brow at him.

“You mistake my meaning. Aren’t you supposed to be me?” the Heretic complained. “I’m not being snobby and xenophobic. I just mean, Gelfling are used to serving Skeksis. What would happen if I told them my own people banished me?”

“The Dousan are a little different,” UrGoh replied, now with an air of patience. 

SkekGra winced as he realized that he was forgetting what ought to be basic knowledge. It ought, especially, to be elementary for him. He had not been called Conqueror simply for his viciousness–which, frankly, had been primarily directed toward non-sentient beings and toward individual members of subjugated races who had distinguished themselves through some particular act of rebellion or disrespect–, but for his penchant for exploring, espionage, the gleaning of information. As he should well recall, the Dousan, unlike most of the Gelfling, had never officially subordinated themselves to the Castle of the Crystal. They kept to themselves and were quite strange for Gelfling, a hardness but also a contemplative glaze in their eyes. They had some obsession with dying that had unnerved the Skeksis, who were in truth so very mortified at the thought of death despite their freeness in visiting it upon others; and so, the Skeksis had left the Dousan alone, provided they kept their own counsel in the desert. 

SkekGra supposed that he was much like the Dousan, now, in that last regard. Remain within the sands and be left essentially unharried. 

“I’m still foggy. Ýou’re right,” he told UrGoh. “But either way, seclusion would be better. Dousan don’t like Skeksis.”

“Just why I suggested this place. Dousan don’t need to know you’re there, unless you want them to. I’ve traded with them before. I can have all our dealings with them.”

“‘All our’?” SkekGra stopped trying to secure the buckles on his pack, which were giving his unsteady hands a great deal of trouble, and peered closely at UrGoh. “You know you’re welcome to go. You didn’t need to see me this far, even. It’s been good of you.”

UrGoh exhaled loudly through his nostrils. “Where would I go? My own folk don’t want me back.”

“But they were so–mild!” The Skesis’ hand went unconsciously to his head, avoiding brushing against the nail. 

“They’re UrRu, not Skeksis. Doesn’t mean they still want me around.” UrGoh sounded a bit plaintive, and SkekGra, who had been aware only of their shared physical distress, realized that the Mystic was also suffering the bereft confusion of the outcast. 

“Shit, UrGoh, I didn’t–I wasn’t–”

“It’s fine. We don’t have time for this,” UrGoh brushed him off, a mildly hilarious phrase given its slow articulation. “We need a lot more water before we go. There’s a steam near here somewhere. Stay here. I’ll go look.” Seizing one waterskin in each hand, he ambled off at an uncharacteristically (for him) brisk pace. SkekGra had the momentary, peculiar impression that he was watching himself stalk away.

<>-<>-<>

UrGoh ambles in, apropos of nothing, producing a small drawstring bag and announcing, “Urdrupes!” 

SkekGra looks up from sketching in a small hand in the margins of a book–they still haven’t accumulated much in the way of paper–and cocks his head a bit dubiously. “Ah, the drug of cud-chewers. Look, UrGoh, if you want to get high, venom-crawlies are the way to go. Just let them bite you a few times. Very effective.”

UrGoh casts his eyes ceilingward with a “Thra grant me patience” look. “The ones around here don’t get you high. Go ahead if you want necrotizing sores though.”

“I already have a ginormous fucking nail in my head, how much worse can it get?” The Heretic flails his hands a bit dramatically as he approaches, in spite of his professed lack of interest, to regard the berries UrGoh has tipped into his open palm. He can sometimes joke about the nail, now, almost two trine out. 

“Very edgy, SkekGra. Sorry they don’t bite, but just try them.”

<>-<>-<>

Left by himself for the first time since his banishment and maiming, SkekGra realized the full import of his situation. He watched UrGoh’s form vanish amid the scattered brush, turned his face to the desert now barely more than a stone’s throw away, and sat down with a jolt. He remembered SkekTek showing them a fizzgig that had had the flesh removed from both its forelegs, and the muscle removed from one of the two in addition, in a demonstration of the Scientist’s prowess in the field of anatomy. Fizzgig was not much longer for this world, but it remained alive long enough for the rest of the Skeksis to get a good long look, its defleshed leg still twitching and the leg with only bone and gristle lying still. The creature had been able to witness its own stripped form; it was hard to say how much it had comprehended, but that was how SkekGra suddenly felt, as though he were observing his own annihilation, objectifying the sudden harsh change that had been wrought upon him.

He sobbed once, loudly, in terror and elation. He was free, of everything that had been his life.

He had nothing, no home, no rank, no ally, and technically he didn’t have even the meagre clothes on his back since those were from UrGoh. He had thrown his life away and all but walked into the Skeksis’ talons for humiliation and mauling. In that moment at least, shocked as he was, he did not regret it.

<>-<>-<>

“UrGoh, the stones are breathing.”

“Maybe they always do, and we just can’t always see it.”

“Is this Thra?” SkekGra, lying on their one threadbare rug on the floor of the cavern, turns his head carefully to look at the UrRu lying beside him. “Do you think we’re allowed to hear Thra?”

“Why not?”

“Skeksis thought the voice of Thra was superstition concocted by the natives. I wonder if maybe we were just angry because we–they–weren’t allowed to hear it.”

“Or, not willing to.”

SkekGra turns back to the stone walls of the cavern, which are breathing deeply and gently. Swirling patterns are now starting to leak down them. These urdrupes really weren’t a bad idea at all. “True. It takes a–a certain openness, a lack of arrogance, I think?”

“Maybe.”

“Ah!” SkekGra tries to sit up and falls back, panting with the thrill of inspiration despite the sedative effects of the berries. “I want to make the stones talk–UrGoh!–to somehow–to the Gelfling, to tell them what has been done to Thra, and to them–”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra was still watching the desert, hunkered in the dust in the slanting late afternoon light with his beak half open in a paroxysm of dread and the strangest joy, when UrGoh returned with the all the waterskins full.

“SkekGra…?”

The Heretic heard his counterpart’s voice, but couldn’t respond until UrGoh had spoken his name a couple more times and shuffled into his field of vision. He shut his beak slowly and swallowed, his body hitching in another, quieter sob. UrGoh put a warm hand on his. 

“It just hit me, what we’ve done. What I’ve done. What they did.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, not now.” SkekGra tentatively turned his hand over, so his palm was touching UrGoh’s. “We should go.” He wasn’t looking forward to striking out into the desert and would rather have stayed in the brush to nurse his contemplative mood, but a more pragmatic concern made itself felt in a prickling at his nape. He murmured under his breath, “The Hunter is watching us, back there somewhere.”

“So is the Archer.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

They moved on, into the sand.

<><><>

The glaring days and chill nights of the desert redoubled the pain and disorientation that had just been starting to lift. They had struck out close to evening, so as to keep a bit warmer walking at night and not exert themselves in the day’s bitter heat. Sleeping in the heat presented its own problems, and both had profound sunburn where the glare struck unmoving limbs and tails while they slept. They had enough canvas and sticks to make a small canopy, which did little in the way of preventing the suns from striking sadistically in at various angles as they trundled across the sky. If they tried to move farther into the little shade they had, they ended up on top of each other, which was equally uncomfortable as sweat formed profusely in their shared body heat. The nights were just as bad, shivering and stumbling blindly on with a pounding skull. 

Only the dawn and the dusk were bearable, almost delightful in the fleeting relief they provided. “I think we’re nearly there,” UrGoh said as they halted in the dawn and put the canopy up, sipping with excruciating restraint at what little water they had left. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Hope so. What will we do then?”

“Whatever we want, I suppose.”

SkekGra flopped down on his side under the canopy, wrapping up the scrap of cloth he’d been using as a head scarf to shade his scalp and face, and putting it under the side of his head for a ragged pillow. “Hm. It might get a bit boring without the Skeksis being shifty and intolerable all the time.” He considered. “Might be nice, too.”

“Do you miss them?” UrGoh, ducking under the canopy, passed the waterskin and also began situate himself for sleep.

“Well, I mean, sort of. They were all I knew. But not really.” SkekGra sipped reflectively and passed the skin back, the course of his thought suddenly diverting, “They could have done so much worse.”

UrGoh cast him and his nail a dubious look. “They didn’t do enough?”

SkekGra’s head pounded, as it had done all day, which he knew his counterpart felt too. “Yeah, it was pretty much the worst thing they could’ve done in a single act. Definitely gets an award for creativity. But they could have done a bunch of other shit. Tortured us for hours before delivering the final blow, as it were.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“Because they were afraid.” The Heretic laughed a little, bitterly, which was a mistake as it made his guts churn and threaten to pitch up the precious water he’d just imbibed. “They wanted to get us out of there as fast as they could. They were very afraid, just of the _ideas_ we brought. I thought we were so powerful and so great when I was with them, but–their house is built on sand, if an idea can threaten them so deeply. Our words scared them. You scared them. The way you were looking at me scared them.”

“The way _you_ were looking at _me_ scared them,” UrGoh added.

SkekGra squinted at the Mystic, a warm feeling in his guts that had nothing to do with nausea. He found himself staring until he stared to feel awkward, and said hastily, “You miss the UrRu?”

“Sure. Their house is built on its own sand though. I don’t regret any of this.”

<>-<>-<>

“You want to make stones speak, to Gelfling?” UrGoh smiles rather indulgently. “I don’t think even I’m high enough for this.”

“No, listen, four-arms, the stone is speaking and everyone needs to know! _Especially_ the Gelfling. We need to explain–what Skeksis did to them, fracturing them into clans to keep them weak–” 

“Gelfling won’t likely believe you.” 

“‘Shard’s sake, don’t be a downer, UrGoh. We just find a smart Gelfling! The stones, I tell you–will wake up and speak–”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize I'm taking a lot of liberties with the term "crawlies," which I assumed was roughly equivalent to saying "bugs" when I started writing this. Apparently it's just one species? Bear with me, I'm only familiar with the film and the show (so far!).


	4. Our House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What ensued when they got there.

“Welcome to the Circle of the Suns!” UrGoh motioned into the cave’s maw arching before them. The stone jutted out laterally before cavern’s opening, into a sort of natural porch where both stood catching their breath.

SkekGra, breath hitching and limbs quivering from the long and precipitous climb, felt both intrigued and mollified. The Mystic seemed to want his approval for once, and others’ desire for his approval was a sensation with which SkekGra was familiar and comfortable. The Heretic reeled for a few moments, trying not to let his exhaustion from the climb show although of course the Wanderer must have felt it. Then he staggered a few steps in, feeling for a moment like a Skeksis lord deigning to claim some newly-conquered monument. The place was rustic though, barely altered from its status as a natural cave, although he got an all-too-strong sense that it had been frequented long ago. “What is this, UrGoh?”

“People, before Dousan, came here to chant and pray. Breath of Thra opens on this cave,” UrGoh replied, quieter than usual and with a hint of reverence, although the echoing acoustics more than compensated for his low volume.

“We ha–they had one of those in the Castle, too. A fiery shaft dropping straight into the gullet of Thra.” SkekGra shuddered involuntarily. 

“Not like that. More a twisted channel in the rock. No fires. But they say sometimes you can feel Thra exhale, a warm breath.”

The Skeksis eyed his counterpart with curiosity. He wanted to drop to the floor from exhaustion where he stood, but it seemed a bit more formality or at least discussion were in order. “And you want us to stay here? We never belonged in Thra.”

UrGoh, beckoning him farther into the airy cavern with his two right arms, looked at him with an indulgent yet also intense expression. “Why do you say that?”

SkekGra snorted. “Thra opposes us at every step. We’re alien, we’re–” He stopped and stared at UrGoh. “You haven’t felt that?”

“No!” UrGoh looked and sounded shocked. “But then, we’ve–UrRu have not tried to use the Crystal badly.”

SkekGra glared, an old defensiveness ready unleash itself. As the Emperor and the Chamberlain had both said from the first, the Skeksis were superior because they dared to assert that superiority against the stubborn, impotently moralizing, dumb animal clockwork of Thra. The planet’s gravitational scraping against its three suns and satellites, the consequent seasons and the shifting of water against the earth and of iron and fire deep beneath the earth, the thin layer of green life it abided on its surface–these meant nothing by comparison with the will of the Skeksis, the desire of their minds to comprehend and quantify and cajole just enough to subdue. The Heretic reeled and tried gamely to stride farther into the large cavern. If he were to live here, he would obviously need to face and conquer this sense that Thra itself might prefer to eject him– His ankles bucked and he fell to his knees on the smooth stone floor, retching. 

UrGoh hurried to his side, swifter than SkekGra would have imagined possible (so, then, was the slowness of the UrRu something like the frenetic swiftness of the Skeksis, natural but not immutable?).

“It’s fine, UrGoh, I’m just tired,” the Heretic brushed the other off, which was true but not the whole truth. If it were the whole truth, he’d not have felt any compulsion to use it as cover for the other truth, that the Circle of the Suns possibly did not seem to like him much. Or maybe he did not like it much, or maybe his physical and mental fatigue were just brewing up superstition.

“Dehydrated maybe.” UrGoh went to remove the small pack SkekGra had in his charge, which included the last of their water. SkekGra huffed at the notion that he needed help removing a pack, while UrGoh huffed at the notion that a simple act of helpfulness need become a pointless power struggle, and any onlooker might have guessed at that particular moment that they were cut from the same cloth. The disagreement resulted in both of the old pack’s questionable straps breaking in unison, sending its combatants tumbling backward in opposite directions. Both winced and rubbed their shoulders where they’d collided with the stone floor.

“Nice work, UrGoh.”

“Meh.”

“Don’t ‘meh’ me, you spiral-hide-having, sanctimonious–”

“I found you a house, now drink your fucking water.” The UrRu thrust a waterskin unceremoniously into his counterpart’s talons and stalked away toward the far end of the space.

“You–you said the f-word! You can’t say the f-word! You’re a fucking Mystic!” SkekGra admonished, talons curled near his throat like an elderly well-to-do Vapran lady clutching her pearls.

“No word uttered on the face of Thra is the sole province of the Skeksis.”

“Oh, I could think of a few you’d probably wish your soft ears had never heard besmirch the innocent air, you–” The Heretic snapped his beak shut when he realized how ridiculous he was being. This was not the Castle of the Crystal, where your friends were there for about as long as your benefit to them was there; where any minor slight, be it real or perceived, was grounds for a pitched verbal battle at the least. This place was new, and technically it was both of theirs’. UrGoh had not needed to stay with him, much less to bring him here. A Skeksis friend would never had stuck around long enough to do such a thing, would not have walked straight into a highly dangerous situation with him on a mere hunch in the first pace As infuriating as an UrRu must, as a matter of course, sometimes be to a Skeksis–really, this UrRu had done him nothing but good turns. It was so little to ask, that SkekGra thank his companion for finding this safe place for them to stay, and SkekGra couldn’t even do that properly. 

UrGoh had unpacked his own paltry supplies at the other end of the cave. There were no beds or other furnishings, those that had once been there having long since fallen in upon themselves. The cave would need a thorough cleaning of rubbish, splinters, dust, rust, and cobwebs; meantime, they would need to camp in this space as they’d been doing on the journey to it. 

The Mystic was half mumbling, half singing to himself, having chosen to ignore SkekGra completely, as he puttered around. SkekGra pondered him from a safe distance, his exasperation ebbing away quickly into remorse. UrGoh must find him uncivilized and ungrateful. And really, one had to be honest, the Skeksis resented the fact that his counterpart seemed to feel none of the alienation from Thra that he himself felt. 

Resentment would get him nowhere. Had he and UrGoh not both agreed that the two groups, apart, were becoming entrenched and myopic in their old ways? That they could stand to exchange information and insight, to learn from one another and maybe to bring about entirely new ways and new knowledge? SkekGra had not let the Skeksis do such harm to them both in service to that vision, only to wander out into the fucking desert and behave exactly like a Skeksis. 

The Heretic made sure his neckfeathers were all smoothed down, then slunk over to UrGoh’s side of the space on four limbs, an awkward but manageable gait. Having approached at or below eye level, he sat down on his haunches and said as gently as his reckless voice could manage, “What are you singing?”

“Not a real song. Just warming up. Preparing to let them out.” UrGoh motioned with one of his four hands at a small box fashioned from bent bark and pitch. 

“Them?” SkekGra leaned down to eye the box.

“They’re not for eating,” UrGoh said, his tone standing indecisively between a warning and an affectionate joke.

“No, of course not. If I’ve given you any impression that I would eat–um, whatever it is–without asking first–”

UrGoh ignored the half-apologetic protest and resumed humming offhandedly, this time directing his noise at the box. Evening was coming on and the cave had grown somewhat dim. The chinks in the box seemed to glow just a bit. UrGoh’s song became more deliberate and concentrated, though nothing approaching the sometime deep vibrato of the Mystics that carried clearly over miles and sounded like some force of nature. The box begin to emit small scritching noises, as of tiny legs. UrGoh opened it and a warm, steady light, a lavender or pale indigo, emanated from it. The tiny creatures within, flexing legs and wings and crawling torpidly over one another, were no longer than one of the Mystic’s blunt nails. 

SkekGra gawked as a few made unsuccessful first attempts to fly. He found his voice catch in his throat (dry throat, surely). “How did you–”

“If UrRu sing to them when they pupate, they go dormant, indefinitely, until they’re sung to again.”

The Skeksis looked again at the box, where the creatures were climbing more vigorously over and among the skins they had just vacated. Their crawling made a soft rasp, their wings a soft whirr as the first few gained the air on their second or third try. The advance guard began moving around in exploratory circles, the height and breadth of their world increasing as their wings quickly gained strength. Soon several more had joined them.

“Get situated while they’re at their brightest,” suggested UrGoh. “Won’t need to bother with a fire.”

SkekGra found himself speechless. He attended to his own bedroll and unpacking while the circle of air around and above them filled with the gentle light. 

“They’ll disperse soon. I thought this was a good place to wake them,” said UrGoh. “Housewarming gift for you.”

SkekGra had arranged himself on his bedding, close to but not quite touching UrGoh’s bed in the manner they’d often set up camp, and was lying on his back watching the calm spots of light circle and spin slowly. He had that shaking going on again that was neither fear nor rage, nor even exhaustion. “Housewarming gift, for me? It’s your house too, if you really want to stay. You found it. If anything, you could turn me out of the house.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

The Skeksis turned his head to find the Mystic looking at him, instead of at the light display, their faces not more than a couple hand’s lengths apart. “I mean, my brain might be on fire, but I do…I do understand that I’m not always patient, or grateful, and also I’m very annoying, and I’m unkind, and–to cut a potentially long speech short–I’m generally a little bit intolerable.”

UrGoh regarded him with an unfathomable expression for a long moment, then smiled slowly with one side of his mouth. “Only sometimes. If that was all there was to you, I wouldn’t have woken them up to give you light. Oh, look at that one there, she’s way up by the ceiling already!”

“Where?” Craning his neck around, SkekGra felt UrGoh slide a long-fingered hand very gently around the back of his head to turn his gaze in the right direction. The Skeksis tried to focus his sudden sense of giddiness upon one of the glowing motes, the smallest one high up near the roof of the cavern–”Ah, so she is, would you look at that!”–as he felt the real cause of it might send him mad. What was wrong with him? It was more than this sharp object lodged in his brain, more than protracted exhaustion and malnourishment. There was this blasted hunger, having nothing to do with food or drink, and not for the first time. Relief and gratitude washed over him when UrGoh, evidently moved by his same hunger but lacking his urgency or conflictedness, nudged SkekGra’s head down to rest on his shoulder. SkekGra inched in closer to him. They watched as the lights found their way out of the cave, one by one, but were asleep before the last one ceased its lazy circle above them and went the way of its fellows.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra considers what they’ll need to do. The urdrupes help with inspiration, but much cold sober contemplation and calculation also need to happen. They’d failed to convince the UrRu and the Skeksis that unity was an option, but, in a way, the Gelfling need the same message. The Gelfling have been carefully cultivated, flattered, intimidated for many generations, the better to provide a world ripe for the Skeksis to bustle in. SkekGra was himself quite active in that endeavor, back in the day. And now the clans need to be convinced that they are strong–that, together, they do not need (and, perhaps more importantly, do not want) Skeksis rule. How can a pair of outcasts do that, when one has been consigned to the stuff of legend outside of the Dousan, and the other has attempted to subvert the ruling class and can only leave the desert upon pain of death? 

The Heretic is glad to have such a daunting project, although it’s also somewhat depressing to have assumed this sense of responsibility for outcomes in Thra. He’s lost himself a bit, out here in the wastes with none but his other self for company. Granted, much of the “himself” he’s had to lose was capricious, uncouth, even power-mad. But still, some of his less desirable qualities have been magnified here, for which he doesn’t blame anyone (except when he is in a foul temper, and then he blames everyone including himself); he is volatile, emotional, a bit helpless when he doesn’t have a clear sense of direction. When he was a major player in the Skeksis’ bid for world power, his inquisitiveness and intellect had come to the fore, and his theatrics were easily channeled into diplomacy or terroristic acts as the situation mandated. He seems to have lost his sense of control and charisma, whereas the times when he loses control haven’t diminished. The loss of control is simply a bit different now, likely to result in a fit of weeping and incoherent rambling where there would once have been a violent rampage. 

UrGoh, he had to admit, is the more stable of the two by far. Really UrGoh has taken on more than his fair share from the first, procuring their supplies, calming SkekGra’s sundry moods, and evincing far more stoicism in the face of their challenges. But then again, left to himself, UrGoh would have no passion or motivation to address the issues at hand. If they are to take on the challenge of mitigating the Skeksis’ malignant influence on Thra, be it through stirring up the Gelfling or fixing the Crystal or some other as-yet-unforeseen means, UrGoh is not reliable. SkekGra insists that their exile not be in vain, that they at least make the effort to put things to rights, to the extent that his talk of it can exhaust UrGoh. This, of course, is why they are together. Apart, they amounted to little more than staid cliches of complacency and zealotry.

<>-<>-<>

They alternated between busily tidying the cave, and oversleeping. Sometimes there was a sense of urgency to get the cave ready so they could begin, although _what_ they were to begin wasn’t particularly evident, and other times a sense of unbearable exhaustion that merited a long rest. 

SkekGra’s favorite time to sit outside on the porch and look over the desert was the long dusk, when the colors and shadows thrown by the lowering suns did strange and beautiful things to the view that was barren and changeless by day. He could never decide whether he was grateful or peeved when UrGoh joined him in his watch. The Heretic was aware of an increasing fascination with his counterpart, and equally aware of a feeling of claustrophobia. He thought he might need to be alone with himself to really understand what had happened to him, but he was equally reluctant to let UrGoh out of earshot for an instant. Soon, UrGoh would need to leave for a couple days to gather supplies. The short, stout, woody plants hiding in the crevices, which released their small stores of water when coaxed with a hand drill, were nearly exhausted. They could live rustically for quite some time, but not without water. UrGoh intended to get a few other things, some cloth and small tools and “something to smoke,” when he ventured forth.

<><><>

“Back as soon as I can,” promised UrGoh, at the foot of the cliff. SkekGra eyed him with a hint of doubt, not doubt in UrGoh so much as in the safety of the world, and he didn’t know what action was sufficient or appropriate. It was one thing to sleep pressed together with limbs or tails overlapping, the cool nights and the circumstance of essentially camping in their own unfurnished home lending an air of necessity to the close contact, but the Heretic was still reluctant to demonstrate affection in the clear light of day. He hesitated stupidly for a protracted moment, his mind racing as fast as his heart, before throwing his arms around the UrRu’s long neck. UrGoh clung to him just as tightly, with all four arms. This was good, it was right– _Please don’t leave,_ SkekGra wanted to screech. This being was him, not him, his self in some bizarre and alien and perfectly suited form (just as he must be to the other), and to let go would surely be like death. The Skeksis finally let go, pulled himself back, rubbed noses with the UrRu, and let him go without a word. He clambered up the sheer path, the rift in his brain trying to tear him open, and didn’t look back until his feet again touched the lofty porch of the Circle of the Suns. He saw UrGoh far below, a diminishing speck in the dull sands, crouched on his haunches and raised his talons to clutch his grimacing face. 

He went back into the cave, just cognizant enough of the fact that he didn’t want UrGoh to hear at any cost, scrabbled to his bedroll, and screamed into the slightly rank blankets.

<><><>

He howled into his bed, seemingly for hours and without cease, before going to UrGoh’s bedroll and curling up there instead with his tail over his beak. 

When he woke, the world was cruel and novel. The world was nothing like it was with UrGoh–and still nothing like what SkekGra was used to, before, with the missions and triumphant returns, the feasts and accolades and accusations and blood, blood everywhere, from the crawlies trying to flee across the table and from the peoples he’d helped to subdue and from his fellows when they tore at each other in anger or in boredom or in the only form of comradery they could grasp.

This fucking nail. SkekGra tried to grasp it with the ends of his talons, as if to pull it out, and the blood screamed and thudded in his head. “What do I do?!” he howled, battering at the stone wall of the cave. The Skeksis rose up before him, laughing and sneering at his foolishness, admonishing him; he should end this, put himself out of everyone’s misery and take the fucking Mystic with him by default. He ran out to the brink of the cliff and crouched there on all fours, wobbling, his limbs tingling with dread and his guts lurching at how close he was to pitching over the edge. This general pattern seem to replay itself as the day glared bright and the chill night sank in. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” SkekSo said, towering above him, leering. “You can never be anything but what you are. Your purpose is to drink the blood of this world. You’re one of us and we did well by you.”

“But now,” appended the voice of SkekSil, “SkekGra is traitor, heretic. Has thrown all his life away like seed pods to the wind. Heretic should let the wind take him, weak and frail as Heretic has proven.”

“Stop!” screamed SkekGra, his ragged pleas echoing back to him in the emptiness of the cave. His nerves flared at him like a gas fire, unquenchable. He curled up and sank his talons into his arms in deep, red furrows through the night, vaguely aware that this must be hurting UrGoh and only the more angry for it. His throat burned, which was surely thirst as much as the work of his punctured brain, but it didn’t occur to him in any meaningful or actionable way to seek the last of the water. The night ebbed into an equally unforgiving dawn, or had it been two nights? The Skeksis staggered out of the cave again, down the path until he found some kind of sandy-colored creature that basked prone on its belly taking in the slowly rising heat of the day. The thing, which was about as long as his forearm, must have been unaccustomed to predators of his size. It didn’t try to escape until it was too late. He grasped it by one of its little forelimbs, lifted its flailing body, and sank his teeth into its soft underside, which made an inelegant and ragged tear that spilled entrails onto his face. The light and shadow were so strange, casting the slowly dying thing in chiaroscuro, it was awful and beautiful–His teeth were not made to kill cleanly, but to rend. He bit in again, gore falling into his eyes and impeding his gaze.

<>-<>-<>

“UrGoh, pay attention!” SkekGra waves a hand impatiently to disperse the copious smoke flowing from UrGoh’s pipe.

“I’m listening.”

“Are you sure?” The Heretic paces, tail lashing, fiddling with a half-finished Gelfling puppet.

“Yes. Damn. Just go ahead.”

“All right, so, the way I see it, we have three problems. One, we need to convey to the Gelfling what really happened in Thra.”

“Yeah.”

“Two, we need to find someone who’s actually open to listening.”

“Correct.”

“Three, we need accomplish objectives one and two without sticking our necks out by walking among them and preaching like lunatics.”

“Um.”

“I resemble that remark.”

<>-<>-<>

“SkekGra.”

The Heretic, taken by the sense of deep glee and horror at his own actions, almost in a trancelike state, jerked his head up with a snarl at the disturbance. The fucking Mystic, now of all times, was back, stooped even more than usual under the weight of newly-obtained supplies. UrGoh was staring at him with horror and–contempt?–-as SkekGra crouched on the path toying with his partially disemboweled but still crawling prey. 

The Skeksis felt his frame rattling with the force of his own voice, its pitch and resonance altered first by a low growl deep in his thoracic cavity and then by a finishing hiss, “Leave me to my business, Mystic.”

“My house, my business.”

“It’s my house too. You picked a convenient time to return. Come back later.”

UrGoh shrugged the baggage off into the dust and took a step closer to him. Was the UrRu–was he trembling? “I’ll not allow this on my ground, Skeksis.”

“Mine!” SkekGra crouched over his hapless prey, neck braced into a sigmoidal, aggressive curve. “You left. I’ll do as I please in your absence. Why must I be the one to change? Why must I make all the compromises around here?”

“ _You?_ ” UrGoh was actually shouting now. “Compromise? I’m the one stuck in the desert, for the rest of my life, because of you.”

SkekGra released a shriek of bitter laughter, spittle flying from his beak, all the more volatile for the throttling wave of guilt he suddenly needed to suppress. “I told you to turn back, more than once! No one is forcing you to do anything. Don’t be a fucking martyr, UrGoh, just _leave_.”

“You first.” UrGoh came nearer to him, reaching out to take his prey away from him. 

SkekGra lurched to his feet, hissing and parrying at UrGoh with his beak, letting his already substantial wrath feed on the unwanted sense of grief. “You’ve ruined me, UrGoh. You can’t even let me have this much? I will fucking kill you.”

“Don’t–”

The Skeksis launched himself at the sad, disgusted face before him. SkekGra was a more than apt fighter, not as strong as SkekVar or SkekMal of course–but lithe as Skeksis went, and crafty–and this plodding Mystic was no match for him, and truly it was a pity that UrGoh had driven him to this. 

He crashed into UrGoh and rolled downslope with him in a kaleidoscopic blur of pale stone and blue sky. The stone skinned their flesh as they skidded against it roughly. They were fortunate not to tumble off the edge of the path. SkekGra attempted to seize the Mystic’s throat in his jaws, which should have been easy in theory–but of course he was only fighting with himself, and that bastard seemed to anticipate his every move. UrGoh shouldn’t have been able to move so fast, although he was still slow relative to SkekGra, but the UrRu was a lot faster than he looked capable of when push came to shove. Somehow SkekGra couldn’t gain the upper hand. The fury of their of their melee ebbed quickly, as any hurt to one was felt by both. Desperate, SkekGra latched into UrGoh’s right primary hand with his teeth, which was the worst thing he could have done, as the pain rendered his own right hand useless and UrGoh still had the use of both auxiliary hands. The Heretic found his throat seized by three hands, and then a long, strong tail thumped him in the head.

A curtain of blackness and fizzing, popping lights fell at once over SkekGra’s vision. He screamed and crumpled to the earth, curling in on himself defensively and clutching his skull. He tensed instinctively, expecting wrath and punishment to fall on him in force, but nothing happened. Of course. He wasn’t dealing with Skeksis anymore. He forced his eyes open to swimming vision and a blurry impression of UrGoh approaching the small animal SkekGra had been tormenting. UrGoh, swaying in pain and fatigue, looked at the creature helplessly for a moment, saw that it was beyond hope, then seized it by the tail and dashed it against the rocks to end it quickly. The Mystic threw the dead animal over the sheer edge of the path, an act that would have appeared callous had SkekGra not known it was intended to keep the poor carcass out of his own reach. 

UrGoh turned on him, his eyes alight with horror and wrath and other terrible things, perhaps the worst being the fathomless grief. SkekGra quailed and hid his face against the ground, not understanding the multiplicity of potential responses that vied for his attention. A heavy paw settled on his nape, a gesture the Skeksis would have taken as one of victory and dominance and which he was too drained to respond to in any other way; he held still, unresisting. The paw instead started stoking his head and neck gently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this is eating my brain and killing me slowly. This is fine.  
> If anyone more versed in the full extent of the lore knows of something more appropriate than "pearls" for a well-to-do Vapran lady to clutch, free free to drop me a line.


	5. Di Cieli e Giardini

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How they grew.

They slept for a long time, or lay between sleep and wakefulness, as though their brief fight had been a days-long march without rest. Neither said anything as the daylight dimmed and grew and waned again in the house. SkekGra unquestioningly let UrGoh embrace him with all his limbs and his tail, which felt very safe and right, although he was still filled with shame at his own actions and didn’t dare raise his head to look at UrGoh. He kept his face buried against the UrRu, the spot where his collarbones met being a particularly pleasant place to lay his cheek. It was strange to feel so comfortable yet simultaneously so ill at ease with someone. Maybe he could just lie here forever, pretend he was only whatever it was about him that UrGoh embraced, abdicate any responsibility to look up and acknowledge the deep well of malice within himself.

He finally inched away just enough to raise his head, his stomach twisting with anxiety, opening his eyes in the dark of night. He felt UrGoh stir to turn his own face toward him. As his pupils dilated, he could make out the shape of the Mystic’s head, caught the glint of eyes staring into his own shadowed face.

SkekGra tried to speak and only managed a hoarse croak. He tried again, barely above a whisper. “I’m a pestilence.”

“Shh. Don’t insult me.”

“Come again?”

“Think about it. You’re calling me a pestilence.”

“No. We’re not really the same. UrSkek is shattered. You can’t even comprehend what I am, this–this blood I’ve spilt. And that’s not a jab at your intelligence, it’s a compliment. You don’t know what it’s like to want–what I wanted to do out there, that you tried to stop me from doing. I don’t ever want you to know.”

UrGoh touched the side of the Skeksis’ face, tentatively. “I don’t need to know what it’s like. I only need to know _you_.”

SkekGra sobbed abruptly, an undignified hiccuping, squawking noise. “Do you want to spend all your time watching over me, restraining me like a childling or a convict? Don’t waste your life. I am what I am. They made sure of that, they put this fucking nail in my head so I can never escape them, they made sure I know that they own me even if I never see them again. You can’t take responsibility for–for me, you saw what happened as soon as you left me for all of two seconds.”

UrGoh’s other hand came up to his face, gripping him gently. “No. I can’t take responsibility for you. _You_ will take responsibility for you.”

“I can’t!”

“Nonsense. Who brought half the free world to knee for the Skeksis, had half of them thinking it was for their own benefit? You’re not weak, and you’re not stupid.”

SkekGra leaned his face into one of UrGoh’s warm palms. “I’d like to believe you. I’ve never felt so weak though, I’ve–I don’t think I’ve ever really been scared, until now.”

“SkekGra, you told the Emperor to go fuck himself when they had you at their mercy. Any time he comes around, and you’re scared, tell him that again.”

SkekGra laughed and sobbed at once. “Brilliant! You’re amazing. I believe my words were ‘fuck you’ though, there’s a distinction.”

“Purely rhetorical.”

“No, it’s a qualitative fucking distinction, UrGoh!” the Heretic rambled, perhaps a bit too excited to discuss the finer points of foul language–But who could blame him for seizing a welcome relief from his sense of doom and gloom? “Go fuck _yourself_ suggests they’re the subject, and they ought to be fucking themselves. Fuck _you_ suggests they’re the object and they should really get fucked.”

UrGoh snickered. “See, you’re going to be fine.”

<>-<>-<>

He wasn’t always fine. Even now, with the nightmare that was his early days in the Circle of Suns mostly behind him, he isn’t always fine–But he is awake, in a way that he never was before meeting UrGoh and his subsequent maiming. In unexpected, unsought bolts of numinous joy, he becomes aware of the wind or the light, smoke from UrGoh’s pipe curling up and away into the sky, and experiences himself as a part of Thra rather than as something separate whose only aim is to subdue and bring order. Thra has its own order and needs no help from the Skeksis. The dread and astonishment at realizing his own myopic arrogance is gradually displaced, in fits and starts, by an acceptance of his history and a sense of gratitude for the changes wrought in him.

<>-<>-<>

UrGoh at last unpacked the fruits of his supply run, forgotten for several days in the neglected baggage while they’d recuperated from their ordeal. He seemed particularly eager about one item, a pouch containing some kind of dried, crushed plant matter. Sitting down in the doorway, he began packing his pipe with the stuff.

“What exactly the fuck is that?” SkekGra crept over to him, skulking on all fours in a way he’d perceived UrGoh found amusing or endearing, the end of his tail twitching.

UrGoh took a long, slow drag on the pipe and emitted a cloud of smoke in a happy sigh. He held the pipe in SkekGra’s direction. The Heretic cast him a quizzical look before shrugging and leaning in to take the stem of the pipe in his beak. He inhaled deeply and promptly fell over, coughing, with his head in UrGoh’s lap. “Oh! Shit! You trying to kill me?” he wheezed. 

“Never.” UrGoh scratched him under the chin like he was a fizzgig.

“Did you just–did you just give me scritches?” SkekGra tried to sound indignant.

“I might have.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, UrGoh. Don’t forget, you’re dealing with a great conqueror, an accomplished secretary of state, an infamous heretic. You–Hey! I didn’t say to stop.”

<>-<>-<>

“We need a name for the Gelfling project,” SkekGra decides while they are out walking in the dusk.

“No we don’t.”

“All good projects have names. We need to know which one we’re referring to when we’re talking about it.”

“We don’t have any other projects.”

“‘Shard’s sake, UrGoh, we have tons of projects. We have the puppets, and the operetta, and the thing where I’m trying to get my other arms working again–well, that one’s just mine, but you get the idea.”

“Fine. Name it.”

“Let’s see, given our objectives…We need to educate Gelfling on the true history of Thra, recruit them to the cause, have some notion of how we–they–can overthrow Skeksis stranglehold after mobilizing them…”

“And we need a way to lure in the right Gelfling, one who’ll understand the message in the first place.”

SkekGra swats lightly at his companion. “‘Lure’? That sounds a little ominous, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. But we need an L-word.”

“Because–?”

“Lure, Overthrow, Recruit, Educate.”

“That’s completely out of order, UrGoh! But, it has a nice ring to it. ‘Lore’ it is.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra was nearly finished with the new clothes he was making from the bolt of cloth UrGoh had brought back. He set his work down and cracked his knuckles. Looking to the other side of the room, he saw UrGoh hunched a bit secretively over whatever he’d been doing with the scraps of cloth. 

“Are you going to enlighten me as to what you’ve fiddling with over there for the past two days?” 

“Soon. Almost done. Go take a walk.” 

SkekGra shrugged and ambled outside for a while. When he came back, there was a smallish box made of cloth stretched over a framework of sticks. Scrawled on the side of the box in a deliberately messy hand was: “Crawlies MENAGERIE.” 

“You remembered about the crawlies menagerie?! I was so fucking delirious, I’m surprised I remember it.” Feeling a ridiculous glee, SkekGra approached the box.

“You can’t eat these, though.” UrGoh was watching him intently.

“Why are none of your presents edible?” SkekGra joked, opening the box slowly. Inside were several small cloth likenesses of various crawling things, embellished with sticks, ink, colored thread, and buttons. “Oh–” Strangely moved, but a bit bewildered, he picked up the caterpillar-looking one carefully. “They’re very cute.” (When had he ever in his life used the word _cute_?) “What do they do? I mean, not that they need to ‘do’ anything, but–Thank you–”

“They’re puppets. They don’t do anything, unless you want them to. Like so.” UrGoh took the small puppet gently from SkekGra and put it on one finger. He made it crawl around. “I used to make them for children when I stopped somewhere on my travels. Podlings especially liked them.” 

“Podlings…” SkekGra echoed absently, out of habitual distaste, but with no particular malice in his tone. “Thank you, UrGoh. I didn’t know you had this particular talent. I like them, very much. You’re sure they’re not edible though?” He ducked his head in and feigned nipping UrGoh’s finger with the puppet lightly, not enough to risk damaging the present. 

“Afraid not.” UrGoh was staring at him with a rather peculiar light in his eyes. 

SkekGra found himself transfixed in a flood of warmth that was pleasurable, but nearly unbearable, and realized his eyes must look the same. His stomach lurched. He went forward with his impulse despite the fleeting fear of doing the wrong thing. “Are you edible maybe?” he murmured, a soft voice he barely recognized as his. He took the puppet away carefully, grasped UrGoh’s finger gently in his beak and licked it thoroughly.

<>-<>-<>

They are on urdrupes again, which, if one is being perfectly honest, happens quite frequently these days. The stones forming the walls of their house breathe and emit lazy swirling patterns, as they often do for SkekGra when he’s in his altered state. The Circle of the Suns breathes like another member of their household, Thra manifest, no longer alienated from him. He sprawls on his side, braced up on one elbow, tracing the spiral grooves in UrGoh’s skin that so nearly resemble the patterns the stones show him. 

“Thra doesn’t hate me anymore,” SkekGra murmurs. “Maybe it never did. The first time I saw the walls drawing these patterns, like you have on you, I might have known Thra was showing me I’m safe.” 

“If Thra can even hate, Thra hates only UrSkek,” mumbles UrGoh, who is smoking while high on urdrupe and is thus barely functional.

“You think?”

“UrSkek–the invasive species. We were born on Thra.”

“So to speak. I mean, we barely remember them, we don’t recall what the sky is like outside of Thra. That’s Mother Aughra’s concern now. Yet our aim is to get back to them.” 

“Is it, anymore?”

SkekGra considers. “I don’t know. The Lore project, if it panned out, might accomplish the objective of subduing Skeksis, without UrSkek having to come back.” 

UrGoh tries to sit up, is too high to do so, and flops back down with a sigh. SkekGra can tell he regrets smoking on top of consuming the berries. “I’ve thought so, too. Relieved we agree.” 

“I mean, if a reintegration of us into UrSkek was the only way to accomplish the objective, I’d still do it. It wouldn’t be unpleasant exactly. It would be a relief, in some ways.” SkekGra can never quite feel close enough to UrGoh, and a mutual yearning haunts each step their feet take side by side. “Sometimes though, I don’t think this pain of separation we feel is such a bad thing, provided we’re together. You know, together and separate and one in two and all that. If–if UrSkek came back, I could never look in your eyes again.” 

UrGoh emitted a sigh of agreement. 

“Don’t misunderstand, of course. I remain committed to the mission. It’s my reparations, for my part in Skeksis maltreatment of Thra and Thra’s own. But if it can happen in any other way, I think I’d be all right with that.” 

“What do you think we’d do?”

“Just what we’ve been doing, but free to leave the desert.” The Heretic curls up next to the Wanderer, draping his tail over the other’s body and resting his head on UrGoh’s sternum. “You and I, free of desert and Skeksis and UrRu and UrSkek…”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra’s action opened a floodgate, the existence of which both had been faintly aware in their careful dances around each other, touching but never too much, not quite sure what the limits (if any) of their affection were. They tussled gently on the floor of the cave, nuzzling and licking hands, necks, faces. Nothing in SkekGra’s experience had prepared him for the all-consuming sense of adoration and wonder. He thought he could go on like this for hours, oblivious to everything outside of their twining forms. When the warm converged more ardently, in his loins in particular, he was stayed by a sense of concern and reluctantly pulled back a bit from the UrRu he’d been starting to grind himself against.

“What is it?”

“This–I–” The Skeksis faltered, embarrassed again. He didn’t want, now that it had reached this point, to be embarrassed about anything that might ensue between them, but there it was nonetheless. “Do you think it’s appropriate to, er, mate with–oneself?”

“I suppose that’s up to us to decide.” UrGoh looked faintly disappointed by the interruption, but he was, unlike SkekGra, a patient creature. “We don’t, um, need to.” 

“It’s, I–” SkekGra hesitated and let the words burst out quickly before he could continue overthinking them. “Skeksis mating is, well, not a kind thing. It’s from boredom, or hunger they can’t understand–or, I mean, pure spite–or playing out some kind of power game within the dominance hierarchy. I don’t want to do any of that to you.” 

UrGoh, who was currently lying on his back beneath SkekGra, frowned faintly as he considered. “I’m not Skeksis. It doesn’t have to go that way.” 

“I don’t know any other way!” protested SkekGra with a nervous titter. 

“Maybe you will, later,” the Mystic pointed out. 

“Well, I mean, yeah, there’s no hurry. It’s not like we exactly have a busy agenda out here.”

“Let it sort itself out.” UrGoh disentangled himself, sat up, and pulled SkekGra in again carefully. “Could we keep doing this though?” He nosed into SkekGra’s downy ruff, biting the side of his neck lightly.

SkekGra shivered helplessly and brought his chin to rest on UrGoh’s shoulder. “Yes,” he whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title found in this song: [Tu Chiami una Vita](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5KHxLzrK5I).
> 
> I have a long weekend, so I might continue to disgorge this story at a rapid rate.


	6. Arrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How they spoke with their first visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this thing doesn't "update" works when you edit a chapter. Just had to make a teensy edit to this because I realized I was getting my own two timelines mixed up with each other. >_<

Awkward stacks and piles of lumber littered the Circle of the Suns. After nearly a trine of habitation, they’d finally acquired enough to complete a loft. It would be a nice spacious loft, with curtains and a long curving ramp leading up to it (Thra only knew how long it would take UrGoh to climb a ladder). They could sleep up there, leaving the ground floor free for crafts, books, food preparation, and a staging areas for large maps and diagrams and other things needed for possible future endeavors. Not that they had much in the way of earthly possessions now, but given they were here indefinitely, they eventually would.

SkekGra studied the scaffold they’d erected and grumbled to himself. This would have been a whole lot easier with a brace of Podling slaves–But, no, really he shouldn’t think like that. Looking down on the Podlings, said UrGoh, was the same as looking down on Thra. No creature of Thra should be used against its will in another’s service. Of course, he was right, but that didn’t always make the thought go away.

Pausing near the door, wondering if he should go out and take some air or continue working, the Heretic heard a small, swift whooshing sound and a thunk just outside the curtains that now covered the entrance.

“Eh?” SkekGra poked his head out, looked about, saw nothing out of the ordinary, then looked down and saw an arrow lodged between two rocks, the feathers on the end of its shaft still quivering.

He cursed and was about to duck what must be some kind of attack, when he saw that the arrow had strange designs carved into the shaft, spirals that looked like unfurling ferns. This was not a sort of arrow made for wasting on volleys at enemies. He yanked the thing out from between the rocks, straightened up, and saw a small figure approaching in the distance.

SkekGra ducked back into the cave. “Hey! UrGoh! Your Archer friend is here, what’s-his-snout.”

“UrVa,” UrGoh corrected, in a tone of lamentation that clearly stated, _I remember all the Skeksis’ names, is it really that hard_?

“Yes, him, UrVa. Sorry.”

UrGoh did a double take. “Wait, he’s here?”

“Yeah, I mean, not right here, he’s got to be a quarter mile from the rock and then he’s got to get up the path. I assume he sent this arrow to let us know in advance he’s coming? Good of him. This place is a fucking mess.”

UrGoh took the arrow, handling it with a faraway look of affection in his face.

“He shot that thing from way over there, right into a crack between two boulders. He’s good,” SkekGra commented with genuine admiration and also envy. 

<><><>

They tied the curtains back, opening the door to welcome the first visitor to the Circle of the Suns since they’d set up habitation there. SkekGra hung back in the shadows as UrGoh stepped out to greet the Archer on the porch, intrigued and a little envious. There were none among the Skeksis–certainly not the Hunter, their visitor’s counterpart–who would embrace him and speak with him like an old friend. Funny, back in the day, the Heretic had thought all UrRu looked alike, but to his new eyes the two looked as different as any two Skeksis. UrVa had an air of swiftness and power to him, as Mystics went; really, he was a noble-looking, almost intimidating fellow. The Archer spoke with UrGoh quietly for a minute, heads bent close together, before the latter looked up and caught sight of SkekGra over UrGoh’s shoulder.

The Heretic winced internally. UrVa had Thra in his eyes, its forests and waters and stones and creatures, and SkekGra suddenly felt as though he had every last Skeksis’ rapacious disregard for Thra to answer for. He ducked his head, keeping his hands folded nervously just under his ribcage. “Welcome,” was the most he could bring himself to say.

“SkekGra.” UrVa extended a hand but didn’t move any closer to him, obliging SkekGra to emerge onto the porch and come to stand near the two Mystics. He proffered his own hand and UrVa clasped his wrist, a firm but unreadable grip, devoid of either hostility or warmth. SkekGra felt a peculiar sense of geometry, with UrGoh standing between them, a triangular configuration of persons–two UrRu and one Skeksis, two parts of one UrSkek and half of another. His hand, dammit, was shaking a bit.

“What happened?” the Heretic found himself asking. UrVa must have known they were here all along (did SkekMal know the same?), whether he’d actually tracked them after they struck out into the desert or had understood it from some seed pod borne on the wind or Thra only knew how–And if he’d known all this time, he wouldn’t have waited a trine to make a simple social call. There must be some news that had compelled the Archer to make this trip.

UrVa released his grip, looked around quickly as though anyone else might be there, and said very quietly, “Aughra has woken, and gone to sleep again.”

“Shit.” SkekGra gaped from UrVa to UrGoh, who looked equally surprised. “Come in, please, our apologies, the place is in some disarray…”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra and UrGoh study the large map of Thra unfurled on the floor before them. The Skeksis’ head is ringing; the nail has been persistent today, numbing and jolting his limbs by turns. He tries not to let it drive him to distraction. He rubs his forehead, just above his eyes, and sips some tea. “Sorry, UrGoh, it was–Ha’rar and, uh…”

“Ha’rar and the Caves of Grot.”

“Right, good, could we get some temporary markers on those?”

UrGoh places some bright, polished stones on the map and comes to sit next to SkekGra. “We can get back to this tomorrow…”

“No, no, it’s fine, we’re on a roll here, my brain can go fuck itself.” SkekGra leans his cheek on UrGoh’s shoulder and grabs one of his hands, absently lacing their fingers together. The pain doesn’t really ebb, but recedes in importance. “Two locations, two clans, disperse the knowledge and the resources–will keep us and Gelfling safer against discovery by the wrong parties–will only work if Gelfling do confront their own internal xenophobia. Perfect.”

UrGoh runs the fingers of one of his auxiliary hands through SkekGra’s neckfeathers, which have gone a slightly less glossy hue of grey during the thirty-odd trine they’ve been in the desert. “We don’t have the allies to do this. We might need to do it ourselves.”

“Leave the desert, defy the Skeksis’ terms of my exile.” SkekGra’s head rings more persistently and a wave of nausea runs through him. He clenches his jaw in defiance. “Sure. If we do it right they’ll never know. Their numbers are few, they can’t keep an eye on everything at once. I did used to be a spy, in addition to all the other dirty work I did for them.”

“I have a hard time imagining you keeping quiet long enough to be a spy.”

“Shut up, four-arms, I can be perfectly quiet, with sufficient motivation.”

UrGoh gives SkekGra a sidelong smirk. “Prove it.” The UrRu twists his neck around and seizes the Skeksis’ throat lightly between his blunt teeth.

“Ah! That’s not fair,” SkekGra protests, his arms wrapping around the other convulsively and talons digging in just a bit. “You know that gets me every time.”

“Shh.” UrGoh nips him lightly.

“Not fair, UrGoh. Please-”

“You’re awful at this.”

<>-<>-<>

“It’s fortunate I happened to be there at all,” said UrVa, passing the pipe back to UrGoh, “but then, probably no accident. She looked around, asked me why she was awake. I told her she must know her business better than I did.”

“And she said?” wondered SkekGra.

“Oh, she was very cross. She told me that, if I didn’t have anything useful to say, then I could just leave.”

“Typical. Crotchety old–”

UrGoh blew a warning puff of smoke into SkekGra’s face. The Skeksis huffed. “Sorry, UrVa, go on?”

“All I could think to tell her, in the way of happenings of import, was that the Skeksis had exiled one of their own and the UrRu had turned a cool shoulder toward the corresponding Mystic.”

“And that didn’t worry her!? She just went the fuck back to sleep?” barked SkekGra.

UrGoh looked embarrassed.

SkekGra inhaled deeply. “Excuse me. I–don’t get out much.”

The Archer looked between the two of them with a bemused expression. “She was, in fact, perturbed, until I told her the reason. She then says: ‘Exiled to the Desert, together willingly? That was more than Aughra could have hoped for!’ And she closes her eye and returns to her sleep.”

SkekGra wrung his hands impatiently. “That was it? You couldn’t wake her back up?”

UrVa availed himself of UrGoh’s pipe again and took a stunningly deep drag of it. “Does one wake the song of the boughs back up when the wind dies down?”

SkekGra barely bit back an exasperated curse, reminding himself to be cordial with their first and only houseguest. UrGoh might speak slowly enough for moss to grow on him, but at least he didn’t pull this shit–at least, not between the two of them, alone.

<><><>

UrVa, tired from his journey, had gone to sleep early in a far corner of the cave. On the porch, SkekGra whispered to UrGoh, “There’s something he’s not telling us.”

“Mystics are circumspect.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m still sure he’s hiding something.”

“Not hiding. Just not disclosing.”

SkekGra bristled. “Same difference.”

“Not really.”

“Fuck!”

UrGoh titled his chin up to watch the stars, unconcerned. “He’ll tell us if he thinks it’s wise to do so.”

<>-<>-<>

“If we're going to leave the desert…” begins UrGoh.

“Upon pain of death!” SkekGra gestures dramatically, doing a comical imitation of the Emperor’s voice.

“Yeah, that. If we’ll eventually need to go to Grot, to Ha’rar, in stealth, maybe we should practice leaving first.”

“Practice leaving?”

“Yes. To someplace nice. The mountains, or the sea…”

“Are you suggesting we take a holiday?”

“Might be.”

“A holiday! A holiday upon pain of death! I love it.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra woke just before dawn to the sound of someone else in the house, shuffling past him. It wasn’t UrGoh, because UrGoh was curled up around him. It took him an instant of sleepy alarm to recall that UrVa was present. He opened his eyes to see that the Archer, apparently on his way to step outside, had paused while passing them. UrVa had evidently been looking at them; he turned his head away quickly and proceeded to the entryway, through the curtains, and out.

The Heretic pondered this for a few minutes, soon realizing he would not be able to go back to sleep. He carefully disarticulated himself from UrGoh and crept out to the porch. 

UrVa, sitting quietly and looking up at the slowly lightening sky, gave a small start when SkekGra brushed through the curtains. This in turn caused SkekGra to start. Both eyed each other with palpable embarrassment. “Sorry to intrude,” muttered SkekGra. 

“Not at all. I’m sorry if I woke you up.” The Archer titled his head on one side, looking quite awkward. He didn’t seem like the type to be easily unsettled, and his discomfort sat oddly on him. “Or rather, I’m sorry I was–-staring at you. I don’t usually watch people sleep, that’s weird. It’s–”

“Well, we’re weird,” supplied SkekGra. 

“Yes. I mean, it’s…unusual. I never thought I’d see a Skeksis and an UrRu sleeping in a pile like fizzgig.”

SkekGra tentatively sat down near the Archer. “Believe me, I’m more shocked than you are. Or, I was anyway, when we first got here. It’s very, now–” He struggled for words. “It’s the right thing, there’s no–It was all worth it, this fucking nail and everything. I wouldn’t–”

He glanced at UrVa again and noted the strained, almost sad expression on the Mystic’s face. It occurred to SkekGra to wonder if UrVa was–envious? 

“I’m sorry,” SkekGra blurted, whether for his babbling or for any presumed hurt on UrVa’s part he didn’t know. “I’ve never talked to anyone about this. I haven’t talked to anyone but UrGoh, since we got here.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad such a thing such as this is possible. I see what Aughra meant, when I told her about you.”

“I would die for him in a heartbeat, I mean, obviously if that wouldn’t just kill him too,” blurted SkekGra, caught unawares by the intensity of his feelings. Having a third party to bear witness to his situation illuminated things with a new sort of clarity. He braced himself, shivering, against the threat of dissolving into sobs.

UrVa didn’t comment, but his silence lacked the awkwardness he’d evinced shortly before. His presence seemed steady and accepting, like stones or trees. “You’ve changed much,” he said after a long time. 

“Only for the better.”

They sat in silence as the rays of the first sun fell on their faces.

<><><>

By the time UrGoh roused himself and came outdoors yawning, with three cups of tea in his hands, SkekGra and UrVa were talking easily. 

“…just about crapped myself,” SkekGra explained vividly, “when I saw where that arrow had come from. UrGoh! Good morning! Didn’t I? I run in there and I’m like, ‘UrGoh, this bastard just shot this thing a full quarter mile right up to our doorstep!’” 

UrGoh stood for a moment with a look of consternation, before noting with relief that UrVa took no umbrage to the Skeksis’ colorful language. “Yeah,” he yawned. “Tea?”

“Thank you.” UrVa took a cup and sipped. “UrGoh, I was telling SkekGra he might learn to shoot while I’m here. You should have some means of defending yourselves, and I understand he’s justifiably reluctant to take up any of his old weapons.”

SkekGra was grateful for the look of sympathy UrGoh cast him. The thought of wielding any instrument of death was a deep concern for him, lest those occasional dark urges flare even more strongly. UrVa had suggested a new weapon, something that had no associations with his former life. It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, but…

“Teach UrGoh instead?” suggested SkekGra, without much hope. There was a pause before all three snorted with laugher. 

“Fine.” The Skeksis made an exasperated gesture, sloshing tea all over himself. “But I’ll be shit at this. I don’t have four arms. Well, I mean, I do, but–” He hunched over a bit, feeling suddenly cold. UrGoh casually flicked his tail over to rest on SkekGra’s. “I told UrGoh all those unum ago that I’d explain what Skeksis did to their other arms–well, Hunter excepted.”

The Archer winced a bit, seemed to be somewhere else for a moment, then shook his head lightly. “I’d be curious to know.”

SkekGra hesitated at length, staring into his tea. He strained at the atrophied, partially enervated and devascularized auxiliary arms. He had them braced with a soft cord, the talons curling down just above his shoulders. One talon twitched slightly, pathetically. “As you can see, they’re utterly useless. It wasn’t mass decadence, or laziness, like one might think. It was–very deliberate. We did it on purpose. SkekSo told us to do it. Not to punish us. On the contrary, he told us he wanted what was best for us.”

He glanced up and saw the two UrRu looking at him in surprise. 

“This was, oh, early on in the whole damn thing, maybe ten trine out from the sundering. Before he managed to style himself Emperor and get us all to believe that, too. He told us that this lesser pair of arms was disgusting, unnatural. Did the bipeds have them, the Gelfling? No. Who did have them? The Mystics, our enemies, these–people we never wanted to think about or clap eyes on again. Who else had more than four limbs? Fucking crawlies, that’s who. Did we want to be like disgusting crawlies? Did we want to be like docile UrRu? No, of course not! Well, we needn’t. We could mark ourselves superior, change our own fate.”

“He made you disfigure yourselves to be ‘superior’?” UrVa looked revolted. 

“Ah, no, UrVa, that was his genius. That’s why he’s sitting in that pretentious fucking throne now. He didn’t _make_ us do anything. He _convinced_ us that we would be superior if we disfigured ourselves. He’s a fucking prick,” SkekGra spat out vehemently. He had never wanted to tell the story to UrGoh, as though saying it aloud would somehow reassert SkekSo’s power over him, but now that he was finally talking it was a relief. “Just like bringing ‘order’ to Thra and its peoples, we could bring our own bodies to knee. It’s strange, looking back on it, but we were truly convinced. Even though the process was horribly uncomfortable, really fucking excruciating at first. Folding them up and binding them with these long wrappings, tight as possible, until bones fractured. Awful stuff. I was always eager to prove my pain tolerance, but I don’t even know how some of the others managed. I suppose the pressure to conform was intense.”

“Why didn’t he just have you amputate them?” UrGoh’s voice was actually shaking a bit. SkekGra looked up and saw an unusual degree of anger in his counterpart’s eyes, as well as an intense pity. UrGoh looked like he was about to start weeping. SkekGra looked away from him quickly, before UrVa could be subjected to an undignified sob-fest, but wrapped the end of his tail around UrGoh’s. 

“Good question. That would appear to be the reasonable thing, yes? He didn’t have us amputate them because, to lead by example, he’d’ve had to do it himself. He didn’t want to lose the use of those arms, himself. It was all an act. He just wanted to establish his control. He’d walk around with his arms bound, putting up this big fucking pretense, but I know that bastard bound them loosely and freed them at night when he was alone in his chambers. I saw him use those fucking arms on numerous occasions.” (Or rather, felt him use them, once or twice, pressed up to a wall, graced with the…honor of SkekSo’s attentions. This was not something SkekGra ever wanted to include in the story. The memory made his skin crawl, the sense of there being more hands than a creature availed of the use of only two arms ought to have, only ever present when his eyes were closed or his head was forced into some convenient position where he couldn’t see what was going on.) “He just did it to us, made us want to do it to ourselves, just to prove that he _could_.”

<><><>

The evening settled in and a fire was brought to life in the hearth. While UrVa was out for a brief walk, SkekGra sat by the hearth with UrGoh, their heads pressed together. “It didn’t occur to me until this morning, UrGoh–You must have felt that, with your own arms, all those trine ago when we bound them?”

“I did,” UrGoh admitted. “It didn’t affect my arms permanently, but it was felt, by everyone else too. Except UrSu and UrVa.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Shh.” UrGoh carefully brought a hand over SkekGra’s shoulder and ran it along one of the withered arms. Coming to the curled talon at its end, he rubbed it gently in his hand. 

SkekGra sighed, resting his beak on UrGoh’s shoulder. “I wish I could feel that. I can, but only just barely.”

UrGoh licked one of the talons and SkekGra shuddered. 

“Was that good or bad?”

“Er, good, I think. But really, UrGoh, you want the Archer to walk in and find you getting frisky with my withered hand?”

<>-<>-<>

The high, rocky pinnacle crowning their house can barely accommodate SkekGra alone, but they are both up there. This is UrGoh’s first climb up. He needed to hold onto SkekGra’s tail with one pair of arms as they ascended (which makes SkekGra remember his physical frailty when they first arrived here, how he could barely make the climb on his own, and be glad that’s otherwise, now). They teeter on that high place, holding onto the rock and each other with all available appendages. 

“You see why I come up here all the time, UrGoh?”

“Of course. Fabulous view.” UrGoh, Wanderer though he was (is? Is a banished, constrained being still a wanderer? One must hope such a title can never be revoked, not by exclusion nor by edict nor chains), eager for new sights though he is, might perhaps be a little afraid of heights–At least, of heights that require such an effort to attain and such a precarious perch to maintain.

SkekGra grips his counterpart more tightly. “Not just the view, but the winds and clouds and the light. Everything is–writ large up here. This is…mine. No, that’s all wrong, I am its.”

“Both.” There is a small rasping noise as UrGoh wraps his tail still more firmly around the stones. “Are you sure you wanted to bring me up here?”

“You all right?”

“Aside from dread of plummeting to our death, sure. But, I mean, this is your own place.”

“Yeah. But mine is yours. I’ll come back up here again, by myself, when I want. I’ll also bring you up here again, if you want.” The Skeksis, while aware of and sympathetic to the UrRu’s unease, is also completely sated, in this way the world has of sating you while simultaneously stirring the most bittersweet depths of your hunger. “Like anything with us. I’m yours. I’m my own. I wouldn’t have that any other way.”

UrGoh bunts his head up under SkekGra’s chin and says nothing. They cling to their perch as the long evening sets in, the three sunsets that change both the brightness and hue of the world so variously and compellingly with their staggered horizon-duckings. “Over there,” the Skeksis says softly, swiveling his head, “toward forest or marsh, that’s no place for us to go just yet. There-” He swivels his head again, UrGoh’s head still nestled under his mirroring the motion, “Over the mountains, toward the sea. I think you’re right. We should go that way, for holiday. Skeksis won’t be watching that way. We should see what we can, while the world is quiet, before it catches fire like we intend it to.”

<>-<>-<>

When all three were gathered at the hearth, UrVa produced a leather pouch from somewhere on his person. He placed the thing on the stones in front of him, closed his eyes for a few moments, then exhaled slowly and looked up at them. “I told you that Aughra said your alliance was ‘more than she could have hoped for’. I told you that she went back to sleep. Something else occurred between those two things.”

“I knew it!” SkekGra said triumphantly. UrGoh shot him a beleaguered glance. 

Ignoring the outburst, UrVa went on in a measured voice: “She got a key out of some hidden pocket in her sleeve and told me to unlock a particular drawer, and bring her the pouch I found there. She showed me the contents and said that I ought to bring it to the two of you, and to leave it with you if you seemed firm in your resolve toward each other. She found this–” The Archer took up the pouch to ease it open, and his hands were shaking. “Long ago, shortly after the Conjunction. She and Raunip scoured the deeps, where it could be presumed to have fallen.”

SkekGra felt the feathers on the back of his neck rise. “You mean–” he whispered.

UrVa passed the open bag across to them. Each took hold of it with one hand and peered inside at a small jumble of sharp-edged, clear objects. SkekGra reeled, nearly losing consciousness, and perceived the same response from UrGoh. 

“Mother Aughra didn’t know which was the right one,” UrVa continued quietly. “All are of a size; she was certain it was in there somewhere.”

“It’s in here,” affirmed UrGoh. “I feel it.” His and SkekGra’s hands both trembled, and the crystals rattled lightly in the pouch.

“I…could not,” UrVa said a bit sadly. “I had a slight feeling, but so small I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t only the power of suggestion. Maybe you can feel it better, being–together.”

“It’s definitely in here,” SkekGra echoed UrGoh. The contents of this bag brought such a terror and elation, he almost wished it hadn’t been brought to them.

“Do you know which one?” UrVa’s voice sounded small now, aware of the power of the others’ closeness.

“Should be easy to find out.” SkekGra unwrapped the scarf he’d been wearing and smoothed it out on the stones. They cautiously tipped the crystals out onto it. His hand and UrGoh’s, as if by some preordained understanding, passed lightly over the shards and across each other, until they met on one shard and the world titled away in a flash of blinding light–a brief image of some painfully familiar and utterly alien visage, UrSkek–that memory, the rending and screaming, nose to nose screaming in horror and loss at themself–

SkekGra jerked his hand back and fell away from the Shard, UrGoh doing likewise. They looked up, quaking like leaves, at the Archer. All three were silent for a while, overborne by the magnitude of the small, sharp object sitting among many outwardly-similar ones on the scarf.

The Skeksis finally pointed at it with the understatement, “That one. Just a small hunch.”

“Will you take it, now that we’ve identified it?” UrGoh inquired of UrVa, a bit hopefully.

UrVa tilted his head in a disappointed manner. “It didn’t come here simply for you to identify it.”

<><><>

When the Archer departed two days later, UrGoh and SkekGra both embraced him like an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had no idea UrVa was going to show up here. There was a vague objective re: advancing a couple plot points, and all the rest came as a surprise to me when I started typing. 
> 
> On a highly related note, [please gaze upon the merch I procured of our protagonists.](https://www.deviantart.com/locksnek/art/My-crew-828005832) Ahhh they're so cute. <3


	7. Flashes from the Axis, or, Colors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How there was - such a light in the world -

_I will die here_ , SkekGra tells himself, at times, to come to acceptance of his physical stillness, his exile, the sameness of the desert that can incite such claustrophobia. He used to travel incessantly in service of his function among the Skeksis, and often to manufacture some pretense of acting in service simply for the purpose of traveling. The novelty of different landscapes, climates, even different peoples, had been enticing–had been necessary. UrGoh had been the same, different in many aspects but precisely the same in this. And now, they are the same in this stillness, this frustrating passivity. 

_We will die here._ Of course it’s not a given. They will need to leave, at least temporarily, to fulfill their objectives, to plant the Shard and the potential knowledge, respectively. But there is no guarantee they won’t come to an end here, at the last. It’s better to accept this, not as immutable fate but as a statistically likely outcome. 

<>-<>-<>

The Shard was safely stowed, until it was ready to move, hidden behind a stone that looked like a firmly lodged part of the cave and even felt firmly lodged until touched in just the right place. That was mostly UrGoh’s doing, who was able to negotiate with the stones somehow, to make them give just a bit under the weight of necessity, which SkekGra still struggled to fathom. 

The cave was also coming together, as a habitation, after an unum or so toiling at the loft. SkekGra considered the new space. They’d joked about a “new camp,” which had been their coded term for a sleeping space ever since they arrived, given their first trying interlude of urgent marches and barely-serviceable campsites when they’d fled on the tide of the Skeksis’ wrath together into exile. The Heretic supposed it was idiotic, in his usual way, to be on his dignity about a more official sleeping situation after well over a trine of “camping” on the cave floor in various states of physical and mental entanglement, but there it was. He paced around the loft while UrGoh was occupied preparing dinner below, and persisted in his nervousness throughout the meal.

“Something you’d like to share?” wondered UrGoh over dinner.

“What?!”

“What?”

“ _What_?… ’Shard’s sake!” SkekGra clapped his hands over his mouth. The curse seemed a bit inappropriate now, given the item in question had come into their keeping. “Agh. Sorry. I mean, this is fucking dumb–”

“Shut up,” UrGoh said noncommittally. 

“Damn! What do want from me? All right, this is highly fucking _irrational_ , but–it seems we have an actual home now…” 

The Mystic shrugged. “We’ve always had a home, SkekGra, since we left the Castle.”

The Heretic dropped his head and pondered the stone floor. “Must you? Really, you know I’m the weaker of us, and to mock me like–”

UrGoh leaned toward him, his face suddenly very serious and actually, well, rather daunting. “Never say that.” 

<>-<>-<>

It probably doesn’t amount to the same as an excursion back in the direction whence they came, to bear seaward over the mountains and away from the Skeksis’ eye, but it is still an act of defiance, to set foot past the boundary of the sands. Over the mountains, the air growing thinner and breath growing a bit sparser, until the Crystal Desert is lost to view and there remains only rock and cloud and blue sky–the sky interspersed with blue and then taken with clouds drifting off the sea and snagging on the mountaintops, releasing their moisture in the weight of the lofty chill–a drizzly shivering in the silver-grey night, the night bright and shadowless with its overcast, huddled under an overhang with UrGoh and knowing such a terror of discovery and yet a gratitude in the close and radiant warmth of two bodies–And then, down over the other side, the broad sands displaced in their time by a broad water brindled with foam at its conjunction with the earth, fading at its visible fringe into the sky.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra paced around the perimeter of the loft like a hunter wary of a perilous prey just barely held at bay. UrGoh, situated indifferently among the blankets, peeked up at him over the top of the book he had in hand–”You’re welcome to stop that any time now.”

The Skeksis stilled his feet, but his hands immediately took up the excess energy, wringing each other incessantly. UrGoh was definitely impatient, for an UrRu, SkekGra reflected. “Look, like I said, this is weird. Skeksis don’t share sleeping spaces. At least, not me, never in all my life.”

“There’s no actual difference. We’ve shared a camp for a trine.” 

“Well, _exactly_ , cud–chewer, that was a _camp_. This is shaping up to–an actual home–?”

“That displeases you?”

“No!” snapped SkekGra, raising inwardly-curled talons. Well, shit, wasn’t he a dramatic fucker? He took a protracted breath. “No. Could you just–could you just, um, bear with me for a second here?”

UrGoh’s glower relented. “So there’s a difference, for you. That’s fine. There’s no difference, for me.”

SkekGra pondered this for a while, until UrGoh had broken their uncomfortable but also wholly easy stare to resume his reading. Then he crouched at the edge of the pile of cushions and blankets and started, quadrupedal, to creep into them, the end of his tail twitching.

UrGoh’s eyes appeared over the top of the book again. He shut the book and laid it aside. “Come here, birdling.”

SkekGra’s innards twisted strangely. He should take serious umbrage to such a remark, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He skulked over to the Mystic, lowering his head to be on eye level with his reclining counterpart. “Is that seriously how you see me?”

“Sometimes.” UrGoh’s eyes were very bright. He appended, reassuringly, “Don’t worry, no one else sees it.” Then he added in a confidential tone, “Sometimes you’re very scary.”

SkekGra felt the tip of his tail, well, all of him really, quivering. “Yes?”

“In a magnificent sort of way.”

“You know, Skeksis are very honorable and not at all swayed by flattery,” the Heretic murmured, sardonically and really also a bit ridiculously given he’d flopped over on his side and was now looking up instead of down, into the Wanderer’s face. 

“Sure.” UrGoh smirked, nudging the end of his snout up under SkekGra’s beak. “Hmmh,” the latter relented, tilting his head back. UrGoh traced the underside of his jaw with his tongue. 

SkekGra quivered helplessly against that onrush of terrible need, that he always tried to keep just barely under control with UrGoh. Of course that had been the subtext of his excessive unease about having a real bed, a real sleeping space, a nice comfortable space typically occupied by people who did more than sleep together. He wasn’t exactly worried about doing something that might hurt UrGoh, but his only understanding of sex had always involved some degree of pain (not violence, per se, but sometimes also that), some kind of aggression, a mere physical satiation that never came with any sense of–of safety. SkekGra supposed he’d enjoyed, well, most of those encounters at the time (and those that weren’t enjoyed were accepted as a matter of course, as getting stuck out in the rain might be), particularly half-friendly arguments with the Satirist that tended to end with them sporting rows of each other’s claw marks for days, but he looked back on them mostly with distaste. He didn’t want to bring Skeksis shit into this whatever-it-was he had with UrGoh, as though Thra had deigned to hand him something of great beauty and value that he might sully. Burying his fingers in the UrRu’s hair, he groaned aloud at his predicament.

UrGoh eased back a bit. The predicament was a familiar one by now. “Should I stop?”

“Nyeh?” sputtered SkekGra. “No! Yes?”

UrGoh stilled and studied something non-existent on the wall. 

“Hey!” the Skeksis wailed.

“In the absence of clear direction, I do nothing.”

“Fucking Mystic sense of honor. Or is it laziness?”

UrGoh side-eyed SkekGra a bit peevishly. “I assure you I’ve both the motivation and energy. I’m not going to do anything you’re not certain about.”

“But I am,” SkekGra protested–unfairly, he knew, given his neurotic waffling. He sighed. “I’m sorry. You know I–would very much like to. I’m worried I’d do something bad, wreck something…”

“Why? When have you ever hurt me?”

“Well, there was that time we had that huge brawl on the cliffs…”

“Which I won,” UrGoh pointed out.

“Hm, yes, you did, didn’t you?” The admission was strangely pleasant to make. SkekGra recalled UrGoh’s hand resting on his nape, and found himself moved to take the same hand gently in his beak. 

UrGoh peered down at him, his pupils very dilated, and seemed struck with a new idea. “Skeksis don’t win in this house. So get all of them out of here, whatever they did to you, or you to them, that makes you think you’re so warped. There’s only one Skeksis I want in my house.”

SkekGra felt suddenly quite foolish about his reservations. He had none of those convoluted mixed feelings about being close to UrGoh, he only thought he did–or could–because of the conditioning arising from his history. Certainly he had been confused at first, that feeling arising naturally from his lack of familiarity with his new situation, but–He had slept in this being’s arms for a trine. He could count on one hand the times he’d actually slept, pleasantly, beside a fellow Skeksis. 

The Heretic transferred his counterpart’s hand from his mouth to his own hands. He stared up at UrGoh, shaking as though his death had approached him. “You win,” he agreed, softly.

It was probably not in UrGoh’s nature to accept that he had “won” anything, as much as it was not in SkekGra’s to concede any “defeat.” As UrGoh had said upon the dark wings of their flight from the Castle, there were something new, together. The UrRu looked carefully and a bit uncertainly at the Skeksis, but SkekGra, availed at last of a new comprehension, leaned up into him, grasping at him with all serviceable limbs, withered hands quivering.

UrGoh buried his face in the other’s collarbone, a rare whimper escaping him. SkekGra gripped him more frantically, licking him everywhere his tongue could reach, managing after a time, “Please–” 

“Are you–”

“Yes,” SkekGra reiterated, untwining his tail from the other’s to lay it aside in an unmistakable gesture. Intersex beings had a variety of options, and his own had usually been to be an agent of penetration unless otherwise necessitated by established hierarchy or the temporary outcome of some tussle. This wasn’t precedented for him, to ask for this, out of simple wanting devoid of posturing or struggle. 

<>-<>-<>

They watch the coast for a full day, crouched among the rocks and brush halfway down the seaward side of the mountains, to determine that they did in fact emerge at a place unfrequented by Sifa or others with sentient eyes and mouths. 

“I think we’re all right to go down soon,” UrGoh comments.

“Sure. Soon. Not yet. At dusk.” SkekGra peers out at the strip of beach still far below and beyond, at the difference in shade and texture wrought by the tidelide nearest the endless motion of the waters. “Watch a bit longer. We can’t make any errors. If Skeksis get wind of us, they won’t have any reservations this time about killing us.”

“What would happen then?” the UrRu wonders rhetorically, leaning on the Skeksis’ shoulder. Not that they haven’t wondered this before, but it is a profound concern that can never be answered and will always reiterate itself, as will any existential dread, until its end is realized. 

SkekGra leans his chin against the top of UrGoh’s head. “Worst case scenario…What–what we’ve learned dies with us.”

“I mean, for us.”

“Rare of you to be the more self-involved one, my heart. I’d like to think we’d be like the wind and the waves, down there, maybe without memory, but still–” SkekGra’s voice catches and he gives up trying to speak, leaning move heavily against UrGoh.

“Still a part of the same thing.”

“Always.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra woke with the conviction of having been shattered, in a good sense, momentarily possessing him the way a fantastical dream might, with a deep well-being and no questions–but then he felt what had woken him, the being he lay entangled with moving away from him. There was a whiff of dawn in the window, just enough to add a faint and almost indistinguishable color palette to the monochrome greys of the loft as he blinked crusty eyes open. 

A vivid sense of betrayal gripped him. “Wh–where are you going?” he hissed, clutching at UrGoh’s wrist with no attempt to use the pads of his fingers, claws digging in.

UrGoh winced at the claws, and SkekGra winced in turn. “I was wide awake–so I was going to make some tea–”

“Don’t leave me! How can you leave?!” SkekGra, if fully awake, would not have been surprised at his own vehemence (frankly, however fine and even ingenious his moments of lucidity might be, he’d always been a tad volatile, and more than “a tad” since that whole incident with the nail becoming lodged in his brain), but he might have realized he was not reacting sensibly. 

‘I’m not leaving–just–Tea!?” UrGoh sounded uncharacteristically distraught.

“Fuck your fucking tea, how could you leave me to wake up without you?” The Heretic lurched up unsteadily, wanting to throw himself at the Wanderer, but instead crouching as though minded to attack.

“Look, I didn’t think–SkekGra, one of us usually does get up before the other, that’s normal.”

“You really have no sense of finesse, huh?” SkekGra ranted, his voice and his frame quivering with rage and anxiety.

“What do you want me to say? I’m not going to apologize for wanting to bring you a nice cup of tea.”

The Skeksis felt his ire surge even more for an instant, but then saw UrGoh’s vague-featured silhouette in the weak, barely-colored light. The Mystic’s stance was hunched a bit, guarded, and there was a sadness to the way he held his head. “…Fuck,” SkekGra muttered, his thin ribs heaving, “You must be right, but–really, consider that ‘normal’ kind of changed a bit…”

“So now do I need to wake you up every time I get up to take a piss?”

SkekGra winced and sat abruptly, or maybe cowered, on the floor. “Oh, no. That’s not what I meant–UrGoh, I just woke up, I’m not thinking…”

“Typical.”

“Damn, UrGoh.”

SkekGra stared at his talons curled on the floor for a few moments that seemed very long, until UrGoh took a couple steps closer to him. “This…shouldn’t be like this,” UrGoh ventured. 

“Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn’t. I’m sorry, I–”

“I’m sorry. I probably should have woken you, considering.”

“Well, not all the time–But, _this_ time…”

“Yeah. I should have woken you like this.” UrGoh’s arms wrapped around him, both pairs, his snout nuzzling into the side of SkekGra’s neck.

<>-<>-<>

The sea, at night, a darkness within the dark gleaming softly with frosty light where it casts itself up on the shore–”This sand is different,” the Heretic says quietly, placing a foot in it as the wave recedes. “So much nicer than the desert.”

UrGoh places a foot beside his. They both withdraw a bit as the next wave comes up and blurs their footprints. They both used to come to the sea, sometimes, apart. They have both missed it, as they’ve missed the mountains and woodlands and marshes. SkekGra wanders farther out into the damp sand. The quality of the light creates a peculiar illusion, as though the sand keeps unfurling in front of him, out into a sea that never rests but walks with him, charting his progress. The waves lap up around his ankles. He could walk on like this forever, on this glistening path, up into the stars. The illusion is broken when a particularly exuberant wave floods in nearly up to his knees, soaking his cloak, tugging at him as it retreats whence it emerged. He turns back to see UrGoh some twenty paces behind him, just watching him. 

They sit back to back, farther up the sand, at the edge of the tideline, watching the night to the west and east. 

“I loved you since I first saw you,” UrGoh says, apropos of nothing.

SkekGra starts, thinking for a moment that UrGoh is talking about that moment after the sundering, that terrible time where of course they had both loved, and hated, but he realizes that the UrRu is talking about the time after that, the first time they really crossed paths as separate entities. The Skeksis huffs in surprise and confusion. “Then–? No, I remember that, I remember the disgust in your face.”

“There was that, too. I always knew there was more than that.”

SkekGra feels perfectly content, and also perfectly ashamed. He’d had none of those more balanced thoughts about UrGoh, he’d only been shocked and contemptuous to be startled out of a bloody reverie by this–creature that had once been his selfsame being and was now alien to him. “Well,” he stammers, “I always said you were the better of us two.”

“Oh. No. Don’t feel bad. I always knew you, even if you forgot me. It’s fine. I got to watch you change. I got to watch you come to me.”

<>-<>-<>

The tea having been forgotten, they lay in the dawn that had spread into the loft, the colors vivid now. “Sometimes I think,” UrGoh pondered, “that–the UrSkek–might be like dying.”

They never said _GraGoh._ It seemed weird. SkekGra considered. Would GraGoh, as that person had been, before, in the hypothetical event of a reunification, even exist as he’d been before? Could he possibly be the same, after being two, and, if so, was that even right? “Perhaps. Would UrSkek remember us, any more than we remember UrSkek?”

“Would we be like a dream to him, as he is to us?”

“Do you–” SkekGra glanced around conspiratorially. “Do you even like him?”

UrGoh snorted with laughter. “What a question. How should I know? Would he like us?”

“I like to think he’d be mortified.”

They both snickered. Then UrGoh grew serious again, his face mildly troubled. “I know what the vision implied, that it would be good–to be UrSkek. I feel like _we_ would die though.”

SkekGra ran a talon through the other’s soft hair. “I mean, yeah, maybe. In the larger scheme of things, it would be worth it. Can’t lose sight of that, especially not me. I have so much more to answer for. I think, it sometimes seems like it would be good. I do think–it would be good for one moment, a merging–but after that…”

UrGoh’s eyes were very bright. “Maybe–we will die either way.”

“Maybe. Everything on Thra dies.” The Skeksis nestled his head under the UrRu’s chin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Colors.](http://www.inspire-us.com/poems/yevtushenko.html#Colours)   
>  [ Flashes from the Axis--](https://www.justsomelyrics.com/620809/coil-fire-of-the-mind-lyrics.html)


	8. Spondee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who else came to call.

SkekGra always worried when UrGoh left for supplies, although anything concerning had yet to happen in their three or so trine at the Circle of the Suns. Other than the sandstorms, and the rare torrential rains, things had been very quiet. The Skeksis, leaning against the rock at the foot of the cliffs, watched his counterpart disappear slowly into the distance. He half sighed, half growled to himself. Aside from being worried, he was sometimes bored when he was alone. To be fair, it was good to have a few days apart, sometimes, and there ought to be plenty to entertain himself with–crafts, writing, perusing their slowly growing collection of books and maps, (not urdrupes, that would be weird alone), making some lame attempt to shoot that damn bow UrVa had brought him last trine–but he was usually upset about the situation for the first few hours.

SkekGra decided on a walk around the base of the imposing rock outcropping that held their house aloft. It was still early the morning and the heat wasn’t bad. He ambled slowly and stayed close by the rock, a headache pestering him that came with a tingling in his limbs, running his right hand along the stone as though to ground himself.

“What the blood-drenched shard are you wearing?” a voice said indignantly.

The Heretic jumped, hands flying to any parts of his person a weapon might once have been, but all half dozen or so instinctive motions came up empty. Apparently, he should have just brought the fucking bow down with him like he’d been considering. He looked around frantically, realizing that instantaneous reversion to old habits hadn’t done him any favors other than to show plainly that he was unarmed, to find a figure standing about twenty paces from him. The voice and the person were instantly familiar, but so unexpected that SkekGra reeled. “The fuck are you doing here?” he demanded, assuming a defensive posture.

“Please. Stand down. If I wanted to kill you, I would have already. You’re completely oblivious, wandering around out here like some Dousan shaman high off your gourd.” The other Skeksis cocked his head. “ _Are_ you high off your gourd, and, if so, may I have some of whatever it is?”

“No,” snapped SkekGra, still tensed in alarm and rage at the random intrusion, then thought to clarify, “No, I am not high, SkekLi, and you aren’t welcome to any even if I was.”

The Satirist took a few steps closer, his head canted characteristically at that vaguely elegant and vaguely deranged angle. “Your hospitality has waned, Conqueror-that-once-was.”

“Skeksis….hospitality waned toward me, a bit ago now. Where the fuck were you then, anyway?” Part of SkekGra wanted to get rid of SkekLi immediately, but he couldn’t help being curious. He hadn’t particularly wanted to see another Skeksis ever again. On the other hand, he almost felt like he’d missed them, or at least, maybe, this one.

“I was…” The other looked skyward and said, with a certain self-deprecation but also highly on his dignity, “I was waylaid, at some length. Something involving an abandoned mineshaft, an errant ship’s anchor, and some Gruenak (one of whom was severely constipated). It belonged to a ship called _The Happy Collision._ ”

“The Gruenak?”

“No, the anchor.”

“I don’t see how those things could possibly be correlated–Never mind.” SkekGra rubbed his temples with one hand. “Why are you here?”

“To see my erstwhile associate? You understand it was–disconcerting, to return to the Castle and be told you’d left with a Mystic and a nail in your head.” SkekLi looked up at said nail, seemed to wince just a bit. 

“Yes, it was a tad _disconcerting_ for me, too. Don’t stare, it’s rude. So, you just up and decided to lurch on out here to the middle of nowhere? No one sent you?” 

“Oh, everyone knows you’re here, but no one sent me. They’d rather forget your name and your existence and everything you ever did for them. I spoke your name, once too often, not understanding the severity of the offense until it was too late. You see?” SkekLi took a few strides closer and gaped, revealing several missing teeth.

“Shit.”

“It’s all right. They let me keep them.” The Satirist indicated a cord around his neck, on which the teeth were strung. He seemed pleased with himself. He always had been eager to disconcert, surprise, confuse. Any other Skeksis would have been mortified to wear the result of his own punishment like a trophy. 

“Uh…Glad that worked out for you then.” 

“Would you like them?” SkekLi said brightly, making as though to remove the necklace. “I did lose them on your account.” 

It was hard to tell when the Satirist was in earnest. “Gross,” SkekGra reproached. “No thank you.” 

“Ah well. I should keep them, anyway. I earned them. You know, before they just got on with it, I had to wait there through this snoozeworthy new ritual thing they do, drooling all over myself like fizzgig because of course my mouth is clamped open. SkekZok styles himself Ritual Master now and comes up with this tedious shit–’ When we fail our ourselves–’ ‘We must be punished!’ ‘When we fail each other–’ ‘We must be punished!’ ‘When we fail our Emperor–’ ‘We must be punished!’”

“No shit?”

“Alas, it’s true. Be glad you didn’t have to sit through that. It was worse than getting the teeth out, but I digress. No one sent me, no one is out for your life. Really, it would be my neck on the line if they even knew I was here.” 

“Then why are you here?” SkekGra realized that SkekLi had continued to approach, was in striking distance now. He must have let his guard down, just a bit. He tensed again.

“Skittish. Sad to see, SkekGra.” SkekLi sighed dramatically. “Well, I wanted to know if it was true. You’re really–out here, with a Mystic?”

“Well, given what they told you about the nail is true, what do you think?”

“Fascinating! Can I meet your Mystic?” 

“No you may not,” SkekGra snarled, the idea actually making his gorge rise.

“That’s fine. I already saw him leave. Maybe I should have just introduced myself to him?” SkekLi took a step too close, and SkekGra whirled to stay facing him, found they were circling each other. SkekLi had been amusing, in another time, but this bizarre game was no longer enjoyable.

“I think you should go.” SkekGra was bristling openly. Clearly, he and UrGoh had become too complacent out here, if they hadn’t even noted a Skeksis approaching their house.

The Satirist’s face registered real disappointment. “I wouldn’t hurt your UrRu. I’m only curious. You know that! You’re curious about everything too, that’s why you were my favorite.” 

SkekGra felt an undercurrent of nostalgia–maybe even sadness?–but he trusted nothing about SkekLi anymore. He wanted this creepy individual out of his face. “Listen, if you were actually, legitimately concerned about me, don’t worry, I’m fine. If you’re just curious to gawk at this novelty, get inspiration for some joke or epic poem or whatever, that’s not an option. Please leave.”

SkekLi growled, craning his head a bit closer. “I came all this way, to see you, and you’re going to just dismiss me?” There was a different hue of anger in his eyes that SkekGra could rarely recall seeing. 

“I–regret your wasted trip,” the Heretic tried. “If you need food or anything for the trip back, I’ll bring it down.” 

“Oh, you think I’m angry because of a wasted trip?” SkekLi’s tail was lashing. “I am angry to be dismissed by my friend.”

“Ah?” SkekGra was vaguely ashamed of his own response, but rejoined with a certain degree of relish nonetheless, “Skeksis don’t have friends.”

“Fuck you, you sanctimonious windbag.” They had ceased pacing and SkekLi was right up in his face now, both of them growling. “Skeksis spoke ill of you, and I snuck out here because I believed in you more than in their petty dramas. I see that they were right about you after all. You are aloof, deranged, contemptuous–”

“Wonderful, then you should be glad to leave me far behind. Skeksis are a fucking pestilence, left to their own devices, there is no _friendship_ with Skeksis. There is nothing real with Skeksis but fear, fear and hunger!”

SkekLi slowly started to snicker, which crescendoed into a fit of violent laughter. “It’s all true then. You’re crazed, like SkekTek said, your mind is parasitized by this Mystic. Have you no pride? You are nothing without your Mystic, eh? Pitiful!”

SkekGra launched himself at the Satirist, bowling him over. How dare anyone speak like that about UrGoh, about he and UrGoh, together? He felt ready to tear SkekLi’s throat out, but he found a knife point against his gut. SkekLi was still laughing unnervingly: “So pitiful, in fact, you went out unarmed. That’s not you. _You_ are dead already. I should put you out of your misery. It would be a mercy.” 

_Try it_ , SkekGra was tempted to retort, but he couldn’t risk that, something happening to UrGoh. He took a slow breath. “You may be right. What I was, isn’t what is. Whatever you’re looking for here, it’s gone.”

“More’s the pity.” SkekLi’s eyes darted, noting his predicament. Relenting would mean opening himself up to a physical attack if he withdrew his weapon.

“I’m–going to get up.” SkekGra backed off warily, hands slightly upraised. 

SkekLi regained his feet, looking baleful and wistful. “Thra gave you this vision, huh? Thra is a meddler. Ruined a good thing. We will continue to bring Thra underfoot, SkekGra.” 

SkekGra shrugged helplessly. The Satirist adjusted his tooth necklace and walked slowly away.

<>-<>-<>

“Caves of Grot, right, to place the Shard?” UrVa glances up from the book he’s perusing by the hearth. The library at the Circle of the Suns has grown significantly in seventy-odd trine. 

SkekGra looks up from his work on the face of a small puppet. Painting the features is challenging, his hands have rarely been quite steady since the nail. “Yes, yes. We still need to think of a mechanism for concealment…”

“I’m telling you, a sword,” rejoins UrGoh, glancing up from some stitchwork on the puppet’s costume.

“The person who’s never wielded a sword wants it to be a sword. Whatever, UrGoh.”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet. I think you should look at it, there’s this diagram but I can’t quite read the script.” UrVa tilts the book toward them, a volume from what the Skeksis (those few who cared enough about history to bother) termed the Early Middle Phase of Gelfling philology. The tome is an assemblage of writings by and about Dousan shamans of the era, its margins sporting the typical doodles of bored scribes–crystal skimmers with annoyed expressions, Gelfling having unlikely interactions with unrealistically gigantic bugs, et cetera. 

“Eh?” SkekGra places his work aside on the bench and sits next to the Archer. “Don’t think we’ve looked at that one much, these things contain a lot of writings about urdrupe usage, which frankly one can figure out for oneself…” He peers at the diagram, then at the text on the adjacent page. “Ohh. This is interesting:

_Shaman Na’qada, harnessed to–_

No, wait, sorry, wrong usage…

_Shaman Na’qada, impelled by urdrupe magnifying the Voice of Thra, entered upon, at that place we call the Circle of the Suns, a vent of the very Breath of Thra. Finding that she might unfurl her wings, she ventured upon the mirror of the sky below the earth; there were many threads–_

Oops.

_–many paths unfurling, many roads-of-the-deep beneath these roads-of-the-sun, leading even unto Sog, and to the biding of the UrSkek lords,–_

Ah. Ugh. That’s fine, this is fine…

_–and to those caverns called Grot -_

Shit!”

Feeling his neckfeathers stand on end, SkekGra gawked at the diagram, a map of sorts, UrGoh also crowding in to stare.

<>-<>-<>

The Heretic looked uncertainly from the Satirist’s receding figure, up to the Circle of the Suns, over in the direction UrGoh had long since gone. Should he go climb back up to the house, grab the bow, watch from the heights to make sure the speck of SkekLi’s form didn’t change course toward UrGoh’s? Should he run after UrGoh to warn him, risk the chance of being discovered near some Dousan settlement? Ought he to take SkekLi at face value? It did seem he intended to depart. SkekLi could have gutted him just minutes ago, or at least had been in a very good position to attempt it; if he wanted to do harm, surely he just would have rather than contriving some convoluted means of getting at him via UrGoh. 

If anything, SkekLi was more the type to lurk around and attempt to create mischief, but maybe even that idea had lost its charm, given the real unhappiness that had crept into his face. Shit, maybe the Satirist really had just wanted to see a ‘friend’; he was not particularly aligned with the Skeksis’ directives, his final words to SkekGra notwithstanding, except when it suited him to be. They’d had numerous private jokes about the ostentatious, volatile hierarchy in the Castle. SkekLi tended to sneak in some of this political commentary when entertaining the group with songs or comic monologues, and most of the court had never realized they were being underhandedly insulted by someone they thought of as an inconsequential entertainer. Really, the Satirist was very shrewd, a broad intellect who knew a lot about a lot of things. SkekGra huffed and paced. Maybe he should go after SkekLi, try to talk to him again?

No, that was no good. The Heretic had crossed a line, said something too offensive. The Satirist had concluded, or at least was well on his way to coming to the conclusion, that SkekGra was effectively dead to him. What would reverse that decision? Nothing that SkekGra was capable of doing anymore, certainly. What use considering trying to get in SkekLi’s good graces now, when he might already have decided to stir up some kind of trouble if SkekGra crossed him?

“Damn it.” SkekGra struck the stone he was leaning against with the side of his fist. “Oh. Owww. Sorry,” he appended, despite UrGoh’s absence. The Mystic would have felt that one.

Finally, he decided to trail UrGoh at a distance, jogging broad perpendicular paths across the UrRu’s, to ensure a collision with SkekLi if the latter did end up on that same trail. But then, that would leave the Circle of the Suns undefended. It didn’t matter much, since the local populations were scared of the place–but what if SkekLi decided to go rummage around up there? 

Well, fine. SkekLi had been duly warned. SkekGra hurried back up to retrieve the bow. “If I find him in here, I’ll kill him,” he rasped to the walls distractedly. His head was pounding so hard now that sheets of light unfurled and retracted rapidly over his field of vision. The Heretic ran after UrGoh as fast as he could, zigzagging across the trail that was slowly blurring in the wind-ruffled sands. Despite the headache, his longer route, and the heatstroke that was probably setting in, he kept up a steady if not impressive pace. 

UrGoh, evidently concerned by the intense discomfort he himself would have been experiencing as a result of his counterpart’s exertions, had turned around and started to come back. Relief and confusion, then consternation and exasperation, warred for his facial expression when he saw a panting, wild-eyed SkekGra scrabbling toward him.

“What in Thra are you–”

SkekGra skidded to a halt just in time to avoid toppling them both over, landing in UrGoh’s arms with enough force to nearly knock the wind out of them. He clung and gasped for breath. “Did you see a–”

“Nothing unusual. What, SkekGra?”

“You didn’t see a Skeksis?”

UrGoh’s conflicted face settled on alarm. “They’re here?”

“No, no, just one of them. Satirist. I think he left, but I wasn’t sure. I was–”

“The Satirist was one of your most consistent allies, right? Do you think he’s a spy?”

“No, not for them. If he is a spy, it’s for himself, like everything he does.” SkekGra, not relinquishing his hold on UrGoh, glanced around again. “I’m probably being paranoid. I told him to leave. I think he did. But it–scared me,” he admitted. “I never see anyone else, let alone…”

“You’re fine with UrVa.”

“UrVa isn’t a fucking Skeksis.”

“Hmmh.” UrGoh kept his train of thought to himself. Presently he backed up from SkekGra a bit and placed steadying hands on his shoulders, looking at him gently and with slight reproach. “You need to drink some water and lie down–both of us. We’re lucky the suns are going down.” 

“Sorry.”

“Nothing to be done. There’s a hidden overhang, behind those nettles, over there. We’ll camp there tonight, you can stay there while I restock tomorrow, and we’ll go home together.”

“Hooray, nettles.”

<>-<>-<>

“So we know where the Shard is going.” UrGoh contemplates the large map unrolled on the floor. “I still say, for concealment, a sword–”

“A fucking glaive, if you want to get poetic about it. But why? You do realize we’ll need to make a forge up here, like we don’t have enough going on already.”

“We’ll make the space. As for ‘why’…” UrGoh tilts his head and studies SkekGra carefully. “We’re going to plant some kind of knowledge in Ha’rar, right? Get someone studious in on this? We also need to consider those who act, not just those who sit and think, if we want Gelfling to unite under one banner. This needs to work for everyone. We should know this, better than most.”

SkekGra fiddles with UrGoh’s hair, grumbles incoherently for a while. “…Sure, fine, figure out how to get some texts on metallurgy in here.”

“I thought you knew how to–”

“Well, it’s been a moment since I did that kind of thing, hasn’t it? Anyway, I was _trying_ to forget.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for some books,” says UrVa.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra lay on his back beneath the overhang, damp rags draped over his pulse points to cool him down, absently picking the itchy nettles out of his neckfeathers. “…I basically told him he wasn’t real.”

UrGoh blew out a slow puff of smoke. “How so?”

“I said Skeksis can’t have friends, Skeksis can’t experience anything real. I–I think I was mean to him? I’d’ve been irate, like he was, if someone had told me that. I thought I was real then, I thought my life was just fucking fine. Seems like a lie now though, like yet another dream of being someone else.”

“He can’t be expected to understand.” 

“Suppose not. I hope he never comes back though. I don’t want to see any of them, I don’t want to think about them.” SkekGra rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He was nauseated, the headache had only gotten worse, his hands were actually numb, and his pulse was racing. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing. Maybe he should have taken SkekLi at his word, indulged his curiosity, maybe that could have gotten the Satirist in their corner. Maybe he’d shirked his own supposed objectives, by dismissing him as an enemy, when SkekLi hadn’t even been present when the others mutilated and banished him? Maybe it actually would have been better if the Satirist had run into UrGoh, whose temper was more even and who didn’t have a history with the Skeksis? But SkekLi was never quite to be taken at his word, this was a known fact. Anyway, Skeksis had done more than enough already, it would have been far too risky to trust any of them in the slightest degree. 

UrGoh lay down next to SkekGra, also attending to the nettles in his hair. “You’re sure about that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose some of it was all right. SkekLi and I had this project translating archaic metered verse, what we called Early Middle Gelfling–from, um, around the time of the First Conjunction–into the modern; we would get very drunk and have big dramatics over whether it was all right to, say, change a trochee to a spondee if the spondee would result from a word that preserved the meaning better. Him and his fucking spondees.”

“You clearly missed him.” 

SkekGra turned to seek UrGoh’s eyes in the now near-complete darkness, emitting a tired whine. “Don’t say that! It doesn’t matter anymore, I’m not that person anymore. Look, it sounds like a nice quirky memory when I put it like that, but all of those sorts of memories are mixed up with Skeksis shit. When I say ‘dramatics,’ shouting matches were where it started, not ended. We’d literally draw blood in a lot of those arguments, Podling slaves backhanded across the room if they came in to refill our drinks at the wrong time, chairs overturned, other weird shit I don’t want to get into–And we thought it was all fun, in this vicious way, it was like we took every opportunity to hate each other and enjoyed that too. It’s exhausting to think about. If I was ever actually the Satirist’s ‘friend,’ I couldn’t be now.”

“I see.” UrGoh, who was somehow managing to continue smoking while lying down and combing the nettles from his hair, thought about that for a while. “You know, it’s fine to still miss what good there was. I mean, separate from Podlings flying across the room and everything else that bothers you now, there was something there that was good.”

The Heretic could feel sleep approaching him swiftly, which was a relief, given the unsettling day. “Ugh, UrGoh, that makes it more complicated. Can’t I just hate everything about all of them and forget it?”

“No! For shame. Wouldn’t that be doing yourself, and everything we came out here for, a disservice?”

“Why are you always right about everything? Four-arm-having jerk.” SkekGra forcibly inserted himself among said arms and curled up against UrGoh in exhaustion, leaving the Mystic attempting to wrangle his pipe and comb with a long-suffering sigh. “Sorry. It just made me think too much. I’m glad you’re here.” The Skeksis yawned, but the next moment became suddenly distracted from his fatigue. He licked and nibbled at UrGoh’s face rather urgently, as though wanting to make sure that face he’d used to think ridiculous and now adored was still the same as it had been, that his reflection remained an UrRu, not another face like his own.

<>-<>-<>

“I thought he’d never leave,” UrGoh says, referring to UrVa, affectionately. They are on the porch, watching their visitor diminish to a speck in the sands. UrVa gives them grief about their urdrupe habit, which is probably fair, considering said habit has become what a person with a normal life comprising normal social obligations and structure might call “a bit out of control.” Then again, UrVa isn’t stuck on a pinnacle in the middle of the desert, courting death any time he leaves.

They’d wasted no time resuming the practice under debate upon UrVa’s departure. SkekGra can now see the desert rippling around the Archer’s receding form, colors seeping into the dull sand in his wake–the crystals that tended to look more hostile than lovely, in their turn, sending fountains and tendrils of light down as though to sanction UrVa’s movements within the world.

“Hmm.” The Heretic sits down with a dull thump, resting his chin on the back of one hand. “He may have a point, I mean, about us being high as fuck all the time. But the urdrupes like him very much, I mean – I don’t know if you’re seeing this, but, Thra likes him very much.”

UrGoh hunkers down beside him, leaning his head on SkekGra’s shoulder. “You know I don’t get the visuals so much, more the premonitions. What are you seeing?”

“All this light and color – coming to him, or going out from him – both? You?”

“I’m getting a sense of those stones you keep talking about, the ones that will speak. I think…” UrGoh shivers a bit, nestling in closer. “When we see the stones, we’ll see the Gelfling, and we’ll see UrVa then too.”

“But stones aren’t going to come to us.”

“No, no, we need to make them and give them a voice, first. They’ll return to us – from Ha’rar.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s my understanding that SkekLi’s only real appearance to date is in _Song of the Dark Crystal_ (lord help me, I have that on order–guess this is my new fandom for keeps). I couldn’t find much info about the character aside from a synopsis of aforementioned book, but he crashed into my headcanons like the Kool-Aid Man through drywall, so here we are.
> 
> Also, I'm back on my bullshit re: drawing. [Have a sketch of the UrGoh and SkekGra in the part where 'Gra is worried about the Satrist stalking them](https://www.deviantart.com/locksnek/art/UrGoh-and-SkekGra-having-anxiety-829254450), photographed abysmally by my horrid phone. It will probably never be finished, because I make a point of not finishing things I start. Except this story, which I will finish on my fucking deathbed if need be.


	9. Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How the Dual Glaive came about.

SkekGra is curled up on the rug by the hearth, nestled against UrGoh and peering over his shoulder at the frayed book with the Dousan shaman’s old map running beneath the surface of Thra. “These roads-of-the-deep, if we can in fact access them without Gelfling wings and Gelfling size, they should eliminate a lot of the peril involved not just in the Caves of Grot objective, but possibly in Ha’rar–”

“Map doesn’t show a deep way to Ha’rar.”

“Yes, but the maker had only a Gelfling lifespan to explore them. We have–well, indefinite time, theoretically–? Absent Skeksis getting hold of us. Obviously the deepways would help with that, too. Shit, maybe we could even go on a holiday once in a while if we were able to travel unseen.”

UrGoh perks up. “We should visit the Sanctuary Tree someday.”

“Yes!” SkekGra gives up studying the map and lays his jaw on UrGoh’s shoulder, eyes closing partway with a distant look. “I remember…” His hand absently strokes UrGoh’s face, who leans his own head in with a sigh and pushes the book away. “We never actually saw the Tree proper, did we? That would be a nice excursion to reward ourselves for the Grot endeavor. Skeksis don’t really show up around there, except maybe the Hunter in his rovings. Bit risky. I would like that though.”

“Would like if the Hunter showed up?”

“You know what I meant, four-arms. I would like to see the Tree, up close, with you.” They fall silent and lie breathing against each other, the more rapid breath of the Skeksis and the slower one of the UrRu gradually equalizing to a unison, the fire warm against the desert night.

<>-<>-<>

UrGoh had gone to return the daeydoim. He sometimes managed to wrangle the use of one of the awkward-looking but well-adapted domesticates from a Dousan herder family on the outskirts of the Wellspring, to move heavier loads of supplies. They’d considered trying to purchase a couple of the creatures outright, as they were quite useful at times, but there was no practical way to keep them at the Circle of the Suns. Anyway, SkekGra hated the things, with their stringy legs and stringy fuzz and the bizarre raspy plates that increased their surface area to expel heat, and he especially hated the way they hawked phlegm at him in alarm any time he tried to interact with them. The feeling was clearly mutual on the part of the daeydoim, although UrGoh got along with them just fine.

Night had fallen. SkekGra was taking a stroll around the base of the outcropping. “Fucking plodding saucer-footed lugee machine,” he muttered with idle malice. “Should skin you alive and make a marionette. Of you. Out of your own skin. And feed it to your family. Serve you right. You and your children and your children’s ch–” 

Something moved a stone’s throw away, a darker blot on the sand, enlarged and blurred by the vague shadow it cast in the rising moons. SkekGra, who had become a bit more wary since the Satirist’s unexpected visit the prior trine, quietly nocked an arrow but kept the bow angled downward uncertainly, doubting he could hit the thing even if he wanted or needed to. Archery was not something he’d been proving good at, although his lack of relish for practicing might have something to do with that.

The shadow emitted a growl of disdain. “Toting a coward’s weapon now?” 

Great, just wonderful, SkekGra thought as it prowled closer and resolved itself into an imposing figure with a blanched head, or rather the impression of a blanched head created by the skull it wore like a grotesque helmet or mask. His guts roiled and his ruff bristled. The Hunter did strike an alarming figure, although, now, it also seemed almost–funny, almost ridiculous, to go parading around wearing some dead animal as headgear. Not that he was one to talk, with a nail protruding from his cranium, but that was really not to be helped. “You people can’t ever just greet anyone normally, can you?” the Heretic lamented. “‘Hello, SkekGra, nice evening we’re having, isn’t it?’ Difficult?”

SkekMal didn’t acknowledge the remark, unless pacing slowly nearer and growling counted as acknowledgment.

“Still a fellow of few words, I see.” SkekGra’s mind raced. The Hunter was probably not here to start trouble; he didn’t have any personal or political bone to pick, and there was no reason someone living on a lofty rock smack in the middle of the desert–whose location, according to the Satirist, was already known to all–would be an intriguing prey. The Skeksis weren’t likely to be calling upon the Hunter to eliminate or retrieve him, as it had been apparent they wanted to forget the Heretic existed the same way they wanted to forget the UrRu in general existed. 

But, if this was going to be trouble, what was to be done? The prospect of tangling with SkekMal was unappealing not just because SkekGra would probably lose that fight, but because winning or even engaging in that fight would also mean harming UrVa. Maybe SkekMal was simply here because UrVa recently had been, a couple days prior? SkekGra wasn’t clear about the extent to which each was aware of the other’s movements. Certainly UrVa wouldn’t have come if he’d been aware that his counterpart was in any sort of proximity. 

As though SkekGra’s thoughts had surfaced on his face, SkekMal said contemptuously, “So the Archer _has_ been hanging about over here. Fucking coward gave you that piss-poor excuse for a weapon, I suppose. You some kind of honorary UrRu now?”

SkekGra bristled. “Are you just here to slander people,” ( _to slander my friend_ , was what he almost said, but somehow he didn’t think that would help the situation at all–and anyway, what was it he’d said to SkekLi– _Skeksis don’t have friends_?) “or do you have some other reason for your kindly visit?”

This seemed to incense SkekMal. He stopped, partially crouching as though to pounce, the few feathers that stuck out from his ridiculous getup bristling prodigiously. “It’s not slander if it’s true. Can’t even get close enough to someone to draw blood with your own hands!?”

The Heretic tried to slow his mildly panicked breathing. Being afraid wouldn’t help. Letting the complementary impulse of ire overtake him certainly wouldn’t help; there may have been a time when he stood a chance at besting the Hunter, but that had been a time where his form was stronger and more alert and his mind was more bent on cunning and aggression (and how quickly the course of time and angle of the light may change). He tried to speak levelly, without a tone that could be parsed as either aggression or submission. “Blood is blood, however it flows. I’ve no interest in yours. I’m just trying to have a nice walk,” and so saying, started walking again.

SkekMal strode up beside him, leaning in a bit too close for comfort. “No interest in yours either. You ever point that fucking bow at me again though–I’ll scalp you alive.”

SkekGra breathed an internal sigh of relief. It was apparent now that this had nothing to do with him, or with UrGoh (thank Thra UrGoh wasn’t here, now). He reached over his shoulder to replace the arrow in its quiver, brushing his own pitiful auxiliary hand, which twitched a bit, giving the Hunter’s perpetually-snarling (grimacing?) face a quick glance. “Your Mystic is my Mystic’s friend, SkekMal. I’ve accepted whatever comes with my Mystic”–oversimplifying, but also true–“and I have no quarrel with the Archer, and I have no quarrel with you. I suppose we–aren’t unlike, in some ways. You follow your own course, regardless of what they say about that in the Castle, and I have too.”

The Hunter exhaled a bit, a sigh or a soft scoff, rifling the Heretic’s neckfeathers. “They know nothing in the Castle.” A pause. “They know–very little. As far as Mystics go, they had a point. Be wary of that. They’re a weakness–”

SkekGra clenched his jaws around the _no_ , trying to remain impassive, and let SkekMal conclude: “And you’ve changed since I last saw you. Mark that, SkekGra. There’s peril in that.”

“Peril?” SkekGra halted and turned to peer at SkekMal in a moment of lucidity, of no fear nor doubt. “Everything is peril. You ought to know. Don’t you go looking for it, in other ways? I’m more than aware of my peril, Hunter.”

SkekMal stared for a protracted span of moments with his pallid eyes, then growled in an ostentatiously noncommittal tone, the eyes narrowing with the sound. He whirled and vanished as uncannily as he’d materialized.

SkekGra, still close to the base of the cliffs by which he was accustomed to walk, stood very still until he was convinced the Hunter had departed, then leaned back, tilting his head up until the end of his beak rested against the stone, neck and upper spine arched a bit strangely to avoid jostling the nail that was becoming a habitual extension of his anatomy, staring up at the pinnacle of his house and the radiant stars. Surprised he’d summoned the wherewithal to be done with the Hunter quickly and without incident, he sobbed or laughed, in relief or gratitude. 

<>-<>-<>

“We’ll need two mechanisms for Ha’rar here, one to select for the proper qualities in Gelfling–like a test of some sort–”

“A riddle?”

“Yes, something like that!” SkekGra claps hands buffered in red fingerless gloves against the cold that has often settled in his extremities since his brain was skewered. “And, once solved, the riddle needs to unlock something that will direct Gelfling here to us.”

“The stones,” UrGoh says with one of those flares of happy, unruffled confidence.

“Are–are you serious? You overindulge my hallucinatory fancies of speaking stones, UrGoh.” When they aren’t under the influence of the urdrupes, SkekGra has to question his visions, which seem so guileless and benevolent when they happen. “I mean, firstly, we can’t even wake the stones–?”

“I might be able to wake them, enough. I’ve made them guard the Shard. You might be able to make them speak.”

“Do you think?”

“I’m telling you. You remember, when UrVa had just left last trine and we were talking about it, and I had this impression of stones, Gelfling, UrVa converging here.”

SkekGra sets his notes down, an ever-expanding sheaf of lists and diagrams that has been annotated and re-worked and cross-referenced over dozens of trine with different hues of ink. “It’s a lovely notion.” The Skeksis’ expression softens for a moment. “You’re full of those. But–” He shakes, literally, to dislodge what sometimes feels like a deluded hope, and feels his frown return. “UrGoh, we’re exiles in multiple senses–-you and I from ours, UrSkek from–from wherever they came from. So…so is that really Thra speaking, to such people as us? It’s one thing to feel some kind of unity with everything, high off one’s gourd, but maybe that’s just literally the urdrupes making us delusional?”

The Wanderer considers for a moment. “You sound like you could use some urdrupes.”

The Heretic swats idly at his counterpart with the papers. “Well, always, but–I’m fucking serious. How good would this plan look, if we were stone cold sober at all times?”

“Why do you continue to doubt Thra speaks to us–to you? You’ve heard it, felt it. Not just with the urdrupes. You remember.” UrGoh sighs, receiving only an uncertain look from his counterpart. “Fine. Let’s look at it now.” The Mystic plops down on the bench beside SkekGra, easing the partially-rolled sheaf of pages out of his hand and smoothing them flat on the table in a gesture of unhurried dismissal. “A riddle or a puzzle? We can make that. Stones coming to life? I can do that, to some extent. You’ve seen that. It’s nothing special. Stones already alive, in their way. All the old tales say so, the ones from before even UrSkek.”

“You think we can put stock in those oldest tales?”

The Mystic considers. “If you want to speak of Thra, Thra’s beginnings, UrSkek had no part in that. It’s worth believing, provisionally, that tales of those who came before UrSkek hold some sort of truth.”

SkekGra recalls the histories of the Skeksis, altered by SkekOk as suited his convenience, altered by others as suited their desire and capacity for forcing SkekOk’s hand. Who’s to say the UrSkek hadn’t had a similar, conveniently malleable view of history? The prehistoric tales of Gelfling, doubtless passed on as oral histories for many generations before UrSkek bestowed writing upon them, came with a different set of transmission-related issues, but who was to say that those tales, sculpted as time and water sculpted canyons, yielded any less accuracy than did deliberate alteration and misrepresentation? “All right, so, say you can wake up stones. How do we make them talk?”

“You can figure that out. More of a mechanical thing, I suppose.”

“I’m not the damn Scientist.”

“Pfft. One of the things you told me–Emperor was minded to give everyone a role, almost a persona, probably the better to order and control Skeksis. Doesn’t mean you don’t have other talents.”

“Hmm, true, true. After all, I went from a Conqueror to a Heretic. So I guess I do heresy now!”

“Doing heresy could be lots of things.”

“Yes.” SkekGra perks up, grabbing the other’s hand. “I do quite a lot of heresy, I shouldn’t wonder, just in existing here, with you.” He wouldn’t ever want to say as much to UrGoh, but that’s sometimes been a point of deranged satisfaction for him, how shocked the poor fucking Skeksis would be to see him engaged in all levels of emotional and physical intimacy with an UrRu. He pulls his feet up under him on the bench, inching closer to UrGoh, craning over to lick his long throat. “You–drive me to it. So much heresy. Terrible.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra looked out for UrGoh’s return that time, after spending a near-sleepless night worrying that maybe SkekMal had not in fact receded back into whatever his own business was, fearing he might feel the precipitant rending pain of an attack from UrGoh’s superimposed nervous system (notwithstanding SkekGra’s own reasonable suspicion that the real brunt of the Hunter’s malice was reserved for the Archer). The Heretic met the staggered peepings of the suns with relief, watching and pacing and quivering on the porch as the day progressed and what few shadows there were on the sere landscape titled and receded and tilted again with the suns’ path. Then he raced down to meet his UrRu, colliding in a tangle of limbs and snouts, rolling down the path like childlings on a green hill of an afternoon where darkness is only a memory.

<>-<>-<>

Their first experimental foray into the Breath of Thra yields mixed results. The ways tend to be narrow, and jagged crevasses drop to unguessable depths not even lighted by the phosphorescent mosses and small skittering creatures. The paths can often be assumed to extend along the air for some distance, over these disconcerting voids, connecting cliffs or eerie dolmens in the minds of travelers capable of flight. If they are to find a way to Grot under here, it may take quite some trine of charting out precarious trails, erecting log or rope bridges, gradually forging a deeper path. On the plus side, the bioluminescent flora and fauna seem fairly consistent, reducing the need to carry fuel for lanterns. 

An overland venture was reconsidered and tabled several times. It would hardly be safe to leave the Desert bearing the Shard with them, knowing Skeksis would set upon them if they were to be discovered. Above all else, the Shard must not end up back at the Castle. SkekSo would seek some way to destroy it, or to turn it to some other unsavory purpose still safely disarticulated from the Crystal. Even UrVa would be an unlikely candidate to deliver their burden overland to the Caves, as SkekMal has taken exception to his counterpart’s association with the exiles and has apparently harried the Archer about it more than once (UrVa is always vague around this point, as drearily circumspect about SkekMal’s existence as SkekMal is vocally indignant about UrVa’s, but the risk is clearly real).

UrVa is already more than helpful, though. He apparently has a colleague who all but left the UrRu Valley some trine ago and spends much time underground, having a reasonably friendly association with the Grottan Gelfling and even curating a sort of library of “relics” in cooperation with them. An ideal place to store the Shard–disguised, of course, which is the next step–and much better than simply blundering into Grot and relying upon chance to aid them. “Once you’ve figured the deeproads out,” UrVa tells them, “I’ll go let UrLii know you’ll be coming.”

“UrLii?” SkekGra chews on the name. “Interesting.”

<>-<>-<>

They hadn’t frequented the passage leading to the fabled Breath of Thra. Occasionally they fancied they could feel it, warming the house just a bit more like an added hearth, but they’d yet to encounter it head on. Some unum after SkekMal’s brief appearance, UrGoh got it in his head that they ought to take the winding passage down to the arch that marked the entrance to the Breath of Thra and wait around for it to breathe. They waited for hours and resigned themselves to set up camp there, by the natural archway that had been just slightly smoothed and beveled and inscribed by some pre-Gelfling (pre-UrSkek) civilization, the petroglyphs now indecipherable to any extant creature. The arch demarcated the maw, as-yet-unexplored by the Circle’s present inhabitants, opening into one of Thra’s multipartite pharynges. It emitted the occasional whistle or creak. 

SkekGra’s feathers kept shifting to stand on end. This must have been what he’d felt so uneasy about when they’d first arrived here. “I should leave, stuff to do,” he said hopefully, after they’d slept there one night without incident, trying to slink away. 

UrGoh caught him by the tail. “We will stay here, until we feel the Breath of Thra.”

“Thra will not–breathe upon the likes of me, UrGoh.”

“Don’t start that again.”

“I–” SkekGra looked around with big eyes and said in a stage whisper, “I don’t like it here at all, it’s…creepy.”

“Why?” UrGoh’s mouth twitched a bit, as though he were minded to grin at the erstwhile Skeksis Conqueror being unnerved by a natural geophysical formation, but his eyes also held a measure of sympathy. 

“There are–” Finding his voice echoed slightly even in the passageway that was only twice his height, the Heretic inched in very close, murmuring in the Wanderer’s ear in a more muted but intense tone: “Strange things down there, that Skeksis don’t fathom. Deep fires that the Crystal can withstand, that would incinerate any living thing in an instant. The inner fires of Thra–as alien as the fires of the stars, that UrSkek could skip among like a game– And–and filled with reproach. Rightly so, I suppose. Everyone in the Castle could sense it, that pit that opened down from TekTih’s–” SkekGra shuddered so profoundly that UrGoh, evidently concerned he might upchuck or faint, took hold of him quickly and gently with all four arms. “–SkekTek’s place… Shit, no wonder he was so different, so on edge, to be in such proximity to that. UrGoh, there was always a reproach from the Crystal, always something it brought up to the surface with it from someplace we could never fathom. And we–we hated the Crystal, so fucking much. It gave us life, it gave us power, and we hated it because we knew that nothing of it was freely given. We knew that our state was always one of war, from the moment Skeksis came into being. Why not war with the beings of Thra, when already, from the first moment, we warred with Thra’s own heart?”

UrGoh seemed somewhat shaken by the lengthy confession. He held SkekGra for a long time, muzzle laid against beak, his hands stroking carefully along the Skeksis’ spine. Finally he said softly, “Still at war?”

“No! No. At least, I don’t want to, and I hope that I–Not with Crystal, not with Thra, not with you, my heart. Only–” SkekGra pulled back a bit, buried his chin in his neakfeathers. “–only–myself…”

The rife darkness within the maw of the Breath of Thra huffed, sighed with a warm exhalation that smelled of water and sulfur and moss. SkekGra shivered and shrank back for a moment, then steeled himself and broke away from UrGoh, taking a few steps under the archway, and curled over on himself in the warmth, quaking, the exhalation sifting through his feathers.

<>-<>-<>

One upshot of the preliminary explorations into the deepways has been the location of a vaulted chamber, maybe half a mile out from the outcropping of the Circle of the Suns, with a couple openings just barely admitting vague rays from the daylight. The occasional sprinkling of sand patters down from the surface of the Desert high above, which has left glimmering dun-colored piles within the space over the eons, in addition to the bones of small creatures that have inadvertently stumbled into the sinkholes and fallen to their doom. This place with its naturally occurring vents is clearly the forge, saving the trouble of assembling such a workshop in the house itself, reducing the risk of smoke and noise drawing attention to the Circle of the Suns.

“I don’t think I can–” SkekGra protests several times during the assembly of the forge, halfheartedly, knowing there is no choice. 

“We have the books, you have the knowledge and the experience,” UrGoh has tried several times. 

“That’s not what I mean,” the Skeksis finally explodes. “You fucking know it.”

“Yes, I know.” They are at the table in the house, hunched over the sketches of the Dual Glaive, a sword that is two-in-one, a pommel to conceal the Shard until its is needed. UrGoh, to his credit, has made most of the drawings, with technical input from his counterpart. The Mystic takes an infuriatingly slow drag at his pipe and studies SkekGra from within a cloud of smoke. “I know knowledge that came from the time with Skeksis–troubles you. It’s only knowledge, SkekGra. It’s not action.”

“Every action is underpinned by knowledge. We’re all fucking puppets on strings. The simplest thrust of an arm, to drive a blade home–there’s knowledge in that, training, practice, muscle memory, the knowledge someone needed to craft an effective weapon in the first place–” SkekGra clutches his head, which is churning inside like a slow whirlpool, like blood leaching into dark earth. “These schematics, this–this is a beautiful weapon–I–”

“You’re merely the maker. It’s for Gelfling to wield.”

“Yes, I _know_. You can’t really get it, UrGoh. I used to make things, knowing I would use them, knowing how and why. I don’t like to think about–about what making this might do…”

“Do, to you?” UrGoh clicks his tongue remonstratively. “You’re stronger than that. You’ve withstood worse. When we first came here, you told me I may as well leave you, that’d never be anything other than what you were…”

“Am I different?” SkekGra looks up a little frantically. 

“Yes!” UrGoh seems to become aware of his own impatience, something that flares up occasionally like one of the flash floods that punctuates the monsoons, a clamor in the desert, and blinks slowly. “ _Yes_ ,” he insists, more gently, taking one of SkekGra’s quivering hands. 

They’re still for a long time, hands clasped across the table over the drawings. UrGoh finally says with great care, “You told me, long time ago, there are things in you that you never wanted me to understand. You try to bury them. Don’t do that, not completely. Keep some of them, changed as you are. These things might yet be needed, in some changed form.”

<>-<>-<>

The desert had little concept of moderation. When the rains would come, summoned at last by the seasonal recurrence of patterns in the sky and the air and Thra’s dance with the suns, they swept over the land with slate clouds and chill winds, darkening the monotonous expanse to a howling dusk. The days, typically unbearable in their heat, became nearly as cold as the nights. That first day, if the rains hit while the suns were still out, was always the best. It must be their sixth or seventh trine greeting the rains, and SkekGra thought he would never tire of it, of watching from the pinnacle as the lowering clouds, spanning the horizon, came on rapidly, a force before which he was utterly helpless. He could see the shadow fall over the distant sands and move rapidly toward the outcropping, even while he was still sweltering in the heat, could feel the air begin to canter with chilly, moist gusts. The sky would dim over him as the vanguard of the rainclouds drew in, and he would scramble down precariously as the first droplets began to lash at him, joining UrGoh on the porch to stand under the clouds as they crowded over the desert and unleashed themselves upon the Circle of the Suns. They would stay there, heads tilted up, until the wind and chill and rain engulfed them and nearly ripped their breaths from them, before retreating in a sodden quaking pile to discard their clothes on the hearth and huddle in their nest of blankets as the rains slid over the sands in a long clamor.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra will be glad to see the last of the Dual Glaive. As much as UrGoh tells him that the vicious impulses of his past can be metamorphosed for some good, as much as they both tell himself that the Glaive needs to exist, to fashion the thing is to tarry along dark paths. He remembers taking pleasure in the forging of other weapons, in other times, knowing what could and would be done with them–and that place in him still exists, peering up eagerly from the crevasses in his brain, unreeling unbidden remembrances of sights and sounds better off left slumbering.

How does one transpose these, the horror and shame of recollection with the sadistic bliss of the memory itself? Gougings, tremors and beggings, flayings, the steam of entrails in the fog of early morning, eyes pleading for life or for death? SkekGra drips sweat in the heat of the forge, repeatedly re-does the wrap meant to keep the sweat from his eyes, sometimes weeps and sometimes wanders off into a place where his mind is all too eager to retrace each terrible tremulous angle of the recollections.

Maybe, the point is not to feel unadulterated shock at who he was, but to know that he is _not_ the same and that his choices will not be the same even if jagged parts of him still understand the temptation. 

He staggers up from the forge, shaking with fatigue, the Breath of Thra murmuring at his heels, and presents the Dual Glaive, razor-crisp and gleaming in the light from the hearth, Shard secreted away within it, to UrGoh, hilt first, blades pointed toward his solar plexus. “This is done, UrGoh. Please, you carry it, until we set it down.”

UrGoh takes it from him, the flat of the blades lying across two of his palms. He studies it for a long time with shining eyes that finally come up to lock with SkekGra’s own eyes. “It’s finished then. You’ve done–so well. And just in time. Come out on the porch, the rains are here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took longer than I'd like, for a few reasons. Hopefully the next chapter won't tarry so much.


	10. By the Secret Stair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How they went underground and who they met there.

For all the old book’s blithe narration of the Dousan shaman’s explorations of the tunnels that apparently exist copiously under Thra’s surface, the matter isn’t so easy for those without wings or light, quick bodies. The inhabitants of the Circle of the Suns, their endeavor as unknown to most of the outside world as is their very presence in that high place, have spent dozens of trine on exploratory forays, their own maps and charts accumulating, popping up warily at various points on the above-ground map to gather more materials and extend their precarious paths of bridges and ladders ever farther beneath the earth. 

They are somewhere beneath the bed of the Black River, hopefully due west of the peaks housing the rumored Grottan Sanctuary if their calculations are sound. The water leaches down through cracks and chinks in the bedrock in some places, and has evidently done so for quite some long time, judging by the glittering stalactites hanging like oddly-shaped Skeksis teeth. Some of these have depositional counterparts below them standing in shallow pools on the floors of the caverns, the two halves straining to meet, to slowly close their ancient maw. In other places, the errant river water is more actively dripping, creating a somewhat maddening percussion that reverberates in the quiet. UrGoh and SkekGra notice at length a louder, more sibilant and constant noise. It’s a welcome relief from days of silence broken only by dripping, pebbles clattering into darkness under a misplaced foot (always an alarming experience, prompting imaginings of one falling in darkness and the other left to wait alone for the correspondent impact death, frantic clingings of relief), hollerbats disturbed from their rest, and the soft skitter of sundry many-legged creatures.

Of course there’s also their own voices. Sometimes they are almost afraid to speak, especially where the path is more void than solid ground. Other times, safer times, they tell stories or sing, delighting in the echo of their song (“as though many UrRu and many Skeksis are singing,” UrGoh had commented once, somewhat wistfully). Now the path seems solid, no dark chasms or gaps to be seen in the glow of the little bioluminescent anemone-like entities that cling to the damp walls. Most of the way has been lit to some degree by living things that make their own light in this darkness, but these brightly-colored little balls with their soft tendrils only occur in damp environments. Judging by how closely packed they now are–it’s becoming difficult to avoid stepping on them–they must be near an underground stream. “The noise must be a waterfall,” SkekGra voices their thought hopefully. 

“Bath would be nice,” UrGoh agrees. “We stink.”

“Nice bath, nice fresh water, and–Ow!” SkekGra pulls his foot back, glaring indignantly at one of the anemones. “Take note: These little fuckers sting.” 

“Have you tried–not stepping on them?” 

“‘Have you tried not stepping on them?!’” mocks SkekGra. “Like they’re not all over the damn path. I should just dance on them like a fucking Podling, squish them all up nice and good, make anemone-jam. Serve them right. …What?! Thra’s sake, UrGoh, I’m kidding. It was an accident.”

“Maybe try planting your feet more carefully.” 

“No, absolutely not, you’re already slow enough for two.” The Heretic fidgets, trying to make a game of hopping among the anemones while waiting for UrGoh to catch up; as usual, he’s quickly gotten ahead by several paces. To be fair, he does end up shuffling and twitching quite a bit while waiting, and that lack of attention to his own movements probably did get his foot stung. 

“At least you haven’t tried eating them yet,” the UrRu comments as he catches up and they continue on toward the sound of the waterfall. Doubtless he’s noticed SkekGra snap up the occasional crawling critter during the course of their sojourns in the deepways, but he hasn’t remarked on this directly. While the Heretic had deliberately and long since left many of his more Skeksis-like habits behind, there is little harm in wolfing down a bug–quickly, mind, not with an intent to be cruel–that might otherwise pester them when they make camp. It also helps their food supplies to last longer.

“And not bloody likely to, now. Who knows, maybe they’re highly toxic. I’d rather not be taken out by a – whatever those things are – cave-anemone.”

“Yeah. Please don’t get us killed in such a stupid way.” 

“Suppose you don’t deserve a secondhand death-by-anemone. On the other hand…” SkekGra turns to look at UrGoh with a deliberately comical expression of exaggerated intrigue.

“What now?”

“What if ingesting these little bastards actually gets you _really fucking high_?!” 

“ _No_.” 

“Oh, come on.” Maybe the prospect of the waterfall is simply improving SkekGra’s mood, or maybe he just sometimes very much likes teasing UrGoh (stands to reason, after all, he likes UrGoh very much). He paces around the Mystic, still mincing to avoid the stinging creatures on the path. “One little lick can’t hurt. Just to see what will happen.” 

“I think what will happen is your tongue will swell up and choke us to death.”

“But we’d die _phenomenally_ high? Maybe?”

“No. In _excruciating_ agony.” 

“Such a pessimist. –Oh, look, there it is!” They draw to a sudden halt, having rounded a bend to find a small but lively column of water gushing almost straight down from the ceiling of the cavern, creating a vivid spray and an undulant series of ripples in the pool into which it expends itself. The foam and flying droplets glimmer enticingly in the multi-colored light from the little creatures. The creatures themselves, although clustered around and under the clear water at the brink, avoid the middle of the pool; they must not like the unsettled currents there. 

“Wonderful,” SkekGra says appreciatively (when had he started saying that any way other than sarcastically?), half closing his eyes for a few moments in the light misting of droplets. He finds a place to set his pack that barely avoids squishing any of the creatures and debates shedding his clothes, but the clothes could use a bath themselves. He hops over the fringe of anemones and wades in near the waterfall, where the water comes up to his waist at its deepest. He dunks his head under, then relaxes into the water and floats contentedly. UrGoh is still attempting to step over the anemones; not exactly made for light bipedal hops, he’s opted to go essentially quadrupedal, fingers on all four of his arms looking for small purchases amid the clustered creatures as he slowly lowers himself into the water, his usually dragging tail balanced uncertainly behind him. 

SkekGra clamps his hands over his beak, a bit too late to avoid emitting a besotted squeak. UrGoh tilts his head on one side, trying to decide whether to be annoyed.

“No, no, I’m not laughing at you. It’s–it’s cute.”

“Doubt it. It’s cute when _you_ do it.” UrGoh has managed to get most of himself into the water, but is still straining to hold his prodigious tail up until he’s cleared the anemones.

“Listen, just because you don’t look like a half-dead bird-goblin doesn’t mean you can’t be cute too.” 

“You do not look like a–” UrGoh, now in the water and paddling over, pauses, then says with perfect honesty, “I like the way you look.” 

“It’s more than mutual. Come here.” SkekGra wraps his arms around the UrRu’s neck, half floating with him, feet just brushing the bottom of the pool. “This is a nice way to end this trip. And, I mean, I think it’s done. This has to be the waterfall UrVa was talking about, it has the pool with the stream flowing out in the direction of the Sanctuary–what I presume is the right direction, at any rate–” 

“And it has a bit of those glowing Grottan characters on the wall, like he said, the–what did he call it?”

“Dream-etching. Yes, we finally found the right place.” There will be no continuing forward, this time, not yet. For one thing, they don’t have the Dual Glaive on them, this being one of many exploratory trips that have left it hidden within the walls back home. They’ll need to tell UrVa that they’ve found their way to the right place, next time they see him, and then wait about half an unum to make sure the Archer has had time to advise that UrLii fellow of when and where to meet them. UrLii will be able to help them avoid running into Grottan, which is certainly something to be avoided given SkekGra in general, and to show them a safe place to deposit the Glaive with its hidden Shard.

“Almost done with the first phase,” the Heretic says happily, combing his talons through UrGoh’s damp mane. “Then we’ll need to consider Ha’rar, the puzzle, the stones–” 

“One thing at a time.” 

“But it’s already taken so long, and it will take long time more, still.” 

“We have time, SkekGra.”

“Yes, but do Gelfling? Skeksis have been content to play at being lords or demi-gods or whatever to Gelfling, but that’s a board with a bunch of moving pieces, and who knows what might go sideways and set them off?”

“You’d know better than I would,” assents UrGoh. “But thinking about it just _right_ now’s not going to make much of a difference. You think all the time, you talk about it in your sleep. There’s a time for resting, too.” 

“Mmh. Suppose. It is very nice here.” SkekGra tries to place the _plans_ to the side of his mind, to appreciate how very calm and peaceful and picturesque everything is. Such peace can never be sustained, coming and going capriciously, and should be taken with gratitude where it comes. They float, entwined, keeping away from the edge of the pool with languid swishes of their tails. SkekGra eventually notices that UrGoh has been diligently keeping their heads from going directly under the waterfall, which the Heretic really should have thought of on his own, considering it was his head that would take the worst of it should that thunder of water strike his nail. “Thank you, UrGoh,” he murmurs. “How often do you save me from my own carelessness, without my even noticing?”

“You’ll never know.” The UrRu licks the top of the Skeksis’ head lightly, not coming too close to the nail or the short ridges of scar tissue radiating out from around it. Time was, the Conqueror had had a fine crest of feathers, five long and slightly iridescent slate blue ones that were highly motile and expressive, but the follicles for those had been destroyed along with many of the more downy feathers just behind the crest; so, the Heretic has a humble, slightly bald pate with a strange bit of headgear instead. Some feathers are a small loss, he reflects, given what he has gained–and anyway, what would he do with such a crest around here, with no other Skeksis to impress? UrGoh is more impressed by things that actually matter. SkekGra leans his head in, murmuring under his breath, encouraging a direct but very gentle licking of the scar itself. This is an uncommon but familiar ritual for them, one that can only be tolerated when physiological and psychological conditions are sufficient, a tenuous sort of pleasure at the almost ghastly intimacy reverberating through both of them.

<>-<>-<>

The trine–what, twenty?–began to stack upon themselves like the massive rock slabs that upheld their home. Those rocks were strange indeed, SkekGra finally noted one day when he had ambled far enough afield to really take in the whole awkward thing like a portrait of some disjointed stony entity, perhaps deposited in their unlikely positions by glaciers in a much colder time, or sung there by someone or something long merged with the dust of Thra, or some combination of those factors. Good job this region wasn’t prone to seismic activity, else the whole thing would have come down long before the arrival of the Wanderer and the Heretic.

SkekGra attempted to explain this stacking of the trine and the stones, during a particularly urdrupe-heavy moment. “This whole house, this pedestal – House-pedestal…is…” 

“Hmh?” UrGoh was curled up on the bed with his tail over his nose, seemingly half-asleep in his haze.

“I was with the desert–I was, what’s it…walking! I was on a walk, earlier today–or was it yesterday–?” The Skeksis, who had been hunched on the side of the bed, attempted to stand up and walk over to the UrRu in his eagerness to get there quickly and relate his–wait, what was it he was thinking about? 

“Yeah. Well. Don’t walk now,” mumbled UrGoh as SkekGra tripped on nothing in particular and sprawled on his side into the cushions with a dramatic mewl. 

“Fine. So, I was–crawling around in the desert, yesterday-today– _someday_ I was, thinking, with the desert–” SkekGra, partly as though to demonstrate said crawling and partly because his counterpart seemed to have the right of it (hard to walk when everything is spirals and angles), crept the rest of the distance. ”And I will be crawling in the desert again, I assure you, or Dousan would, dust to dust–” 

“We aren’t dust. We–” UrGoh glanced up with a vaguely miffed expression, also not in a particularly coherent mood. “–came from–light…?” 

“Aha. Yes, from a refraction. And we came from darkness–ignorance–”

“Arrogance–”

“Yes. All a refraction. But–” SkekGra crawled halfway up onto UrGoh’s flank and sprawled there, contented but a little annoyed to have lost his train of thought completely. “The fuck was I just talking about, UrGoh?”

“As I recall, you are crawling in the dust.” 

“As one does. And we–we will crawl on the wind–and–in the streams, the pools.”

“You don’t think we’ll go back–” UrGoh peeked out from under his tail enough to point his long snout ceilingward in some indication of the direction he meant to explicate, then gave up and let his head flop back down on the blankets. 

“Thra only knows.” SkekGra inched up to lay his throat and chin against UrGoh’s. “Do you think?”

UrGoh paused a long time, until SkekGra had forgotten the conversation was occurring and had begun tracing circumscribed triangles in the air with one talon. “No,” UrGoh finally said.

“Oh? –Oh, right. Good. Don’t want to go back there. I like it here.”

“It’s all right. Can’t complain.”

“Oh, that’s right!” yelled SkekGra, suddenly enough (and right in UrGoh’s ear, coincidentally) that even the Mystic started a bit from his reverie and grumbled a curse.

“I was walking about these–I was _talking_ about these stones, under our house. I was _walking_ about them, too, yesterday I think, round about, as one does–Got to get some exercise, after all–”

UrGoh grabbed at one of the Skeksis’ gesticulating hands languidly. “Focus?”

“Thank you. Yes. Stones here–look at them, they look precarious, look like they won’t work, but they stand firm, they make something right. Our house, atop it all. It’s–ourself.”

<>-<>-<>

The other UrRu meets them at the path just beyond the waterfall’s pool along the stream veering east-northeast, a cautious figure, neck craned forward (funny, the Skeksis and the UrRu are not that dissimilar when it comes down to it, the one more avian and the other more marsupialian, but actually quite similar in general outline). “UrGoh,” the figure volunteers, ignoring SkekGra, or rather, acknowledging the latter by way of not doing so.

“UrLii,” the Wanderer answers, glancing sidelong at the Heretic, who motions his counterpart forward with a feigned indifference. It’s pretty evident UrLii would rather speak with UrGoh alone first. SkekGra tries to pretend he isn’t attempting to overhear the murmured exchange as the other two greet each other and then commence a quiet debate of sorts a bit farther up the path.

“...and we should trust him,” mutters UrLii, head canted at a familiar angle, hazel eyes narrowed, “with–with _history_ –Why?”

“UrVa’s told you, many times,” insists UrGoh, “and I’ll tell you the same. SkekGra is aware of every aspect of this venture, has initiated and plotted the majority of…” 

The voices are lost again. SkekGra tries not to try to listen. After all, overhearing might only make him want to defend or excuse himself. UrVa and now UrGoh can probably speak to his qualifications far better than he can, himself, given such an audience. He halfway tries to focus on the waterfall, to watch the light of the glowing anemones flashing off the water droplets out of his left eye.

“Hmh,” UrLii assents at length, more loudly. “And you’ve bought something important, as the Archer gives me to understand, to be bestowed within the Tomb of Relics?”

The Heretic, sensing this is an invitation to participate in the conversation, ventures further up the path to stand near the other two. UrLii is quite a different creature than UrGoh or UrVa, smaller and with long hands that seemed outsized relative to the rest of him, with an entirely different comportment. How had SkekGra ever thought that all the UrRu looked alike? How silly–how, well, xenophobic, it had been of him–or, at best, ignorant. The Skeksis doesn’t bother with much of an introduction, simply nodding to the UrRu Storyteller and answering as though he’d had a part in the conversation all along, “It’s quite important. It’s a weapon–and more than a weapon–that may serve in putting an end to Skeksis power.”

UrLii smirks faintly. “Why would you want that, Conqueror-that-was?”

“Well–” SkekGra is somewhat flustered. The Mystic is so eerily familiar he can’t decide whether it’s comforting or offputting. “As you’ve just said, I _was._ What rumor have you heard of me, in the last hundred trine? Aside from, maybe, that bit about my being branded Heretic et cetera. What could be more heretical than wanting Skeksis rule subdued by any means? Skeksis will kill me–they’ll kill _us_ if they ever know of our presence beyond the desert.”

“You sing a strange song. Is it worth your life?” 

“…If–if it needs be.”

UrGoh eases up beside him. “His life is mine.”

UrLii’s pupils dilate and contract, quickly, almost imperceptibly. “Skeksis, in my humble experience, do not invite death. They inflict it. They visited it upon the last of the bell-birds, and the song of those venerable ones is no longer heard in the mountains now.”

“Bell-birds?” UrGoh echoes, with the same disoriented tone as SkekGra’s when the latter adds, “They aren’t a myth…?”

“No.” UrLii shoots them both a somewhat venomous look, although his voice is soft, pleasant even. “They were the singing voice of Thra’s heights, when that first Conjunction blinded the land. The change was too much for them to adapt to, and they were nearly gone by the next Conjunction. You–neither of you!–you don’t remember? In any case, Skeksis slew the last two breeding pairs, which I gather I’m to presume _you_ had no part in.”

UrGoh looks guilty too, at this dual accusation. “I don’t remember them.”

“Hm. Cretins.” The Storyteller’s expression is for an instant so filled with sorrow and contempt that both the Wanderer and the Heretic draw back, in shame for some unremembered trespass. “Ah well,” UrLii resumes brightly, a bit abstractedly, “One cannot blame the northernmost branch of a tree if the southernmost branch crushed one’s house, eh?” 

“Everyone has much to answer for,” SkekGra volunteers, hunching his shoulders a bit, “and my ilk in particular. I’m guessing it was SkekMal or SkekUng who brought an end to these birds. I have no memory of them either. Please…UrLii… UrGoh holds the thing we need to leave with you–with Grottan–in the Tomb of Relics. I’ll stay here if you don’t want a Skeksis along with you.” 

UrGoh turns just enough to scowl at SkekGra, determined they must see the Glaive to its destination together, while UrLii squints to himself in befuddlement. 

“Does it matter?” the Storyteller finally asks, perhaps rhetorically. “If UrGoh and SkekGra are one creature, what’s known to one will eventually be known to the other. You must understand, I’m not simply concerned for logistical reasons. You seem–forthright enough. But I, I’m concerned not just for Grottan tunnels and Grottan lives. There’s a whole history in the Tomb of Relics, with which Thra entrusted Grottan Gelfling and with which they in turn vouchsafed to entrust me.” 

UrLii’s voice is so conflicted that SkekGra’s own gut twists oddly. The Storyteller concludes, “If this history dies, these words and artifacts, then I may just as well die.” 

The Heretic leans in a bit closer. “I do understand. I had a–colleague who was very much like you. I have no wish to put any texts or artifacts at risk. Go on without me, or without either of us if you must, I’m sure UrGoh will hand it over to you here.” 

“Hey,” UrGoh mutters a bit resentfully, but can’t seem to find any real objection.

UrLii looks up at the Skeksis, a long and eerily searching stare, before turning away suddenly. “No matter. Two UrRu have vouched for you, and you vouch for yourself by failing to vouch for yourself. Come along, step softy, speak more softly. Don’t vex the Grottan or the hollerbats.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra flexed the fingers of his mangled auxiliary hands. He could make a fist, a weak one, nothing that mattered. He bent over a table and tried to pick up a piece of paper, which was no good; not enough fine motor control or strength to press the fingers tightly enough together to even keep the thing in his grasp. He tried a rolled-up scroll, also no good; too heavy. Pathetic. 

“Fucking–sociopathic fucking–tyrant–” he murmured, bitterness welling over him for a moment. That was really no use though, or rather, it was of limited use, blaming SkekSo. SkekSo may have managed to convince most of them to mangle themselves, but there was a fine line between acknowledging and merely dwelling unproductively on that fact. He was uneasily aware that, the more distant the Emperor and all the other Skeksis became temporally, the closer and more visceral his hatred of SkekSo grew (when he did take the time to think about it, or when it crashed upon him as it had now). “Ugh. Hardly matters anymore,” the Heretic attempted to reframe the situation: “Well, you know, maybe–” He tried gripping a feather quill, an object not too sheer and not too heavy. It remained in his tremulous grasp. He couldn’t really pick it up, per se, as he was unable to extend or flex his forearm. He straightened up at the waist and pondered the quill in his shaking hand. Well, that was something.

A shuffling off to his right informed him that UrGoh had returned from his walk. SkekGra clenched reflexively around the quill, the other hand also tightening itself instinctively, and turned with an almost defensive air. UrGoh’s face ran through an impressively rapid gamut of reactions, from interested to pleased to embarrassed; the Mystic was quite aware that the Skeksis’ attempts to regain the use of his other arms, though spoken of openly enough, was, in practice, a private thing.

UrGoh’s voice couldn’t keep up with his reactions. “Oh, you’ve got–Sorry, should–That’s–-Should I leave you alone?”

The Heretic’s auxiliary hand quivered and the quill fell to the floor. “Well, shit. No, sorry, not your fault, I wasn’t expecting you back, but–”

The Wanderer paused, half-minded to pick the thing up. “That’s very good, though.”

“Given the circumstances, sure.” SkekGra let the all-but-useless hands droop, torn between triumph and vexation. He growled at nothing in particular, or everything. “UrGoh, I’ve been trying for like sixty trine, and these fucking things still won’t work right.” He kicked at the quill idly, which of course only sent it drifting a few inches. 

“Not your fault.”

“No. Yes. I let myself be led like a tame landstrider. We all did, except the Hunter, I’ll say that much for him. We were _supposed_ to have four arms, like you, we were supposed to be beautiful–And, we–we didn’t want to be like you, that fucking rabid twig _told_ us we didn’t want to be like UrRu, and we listened. How, thrice how, could we have been so–”

“Everyone was new then. _All_ of us. We were afraid, we wanted someone to tell us what to do.”

SkekGra bit back a scoff. Yes, it must have been so terrible, being taken under UrSu’s wing. The Skeksis knew he wasn’t being exactly fair. The Mystics had suffered, in their own way. But that way had never involved the taking of eyes, limbs, brain matter. SkekGra hissed softly to himself, a glottal and almost inaudible sound at the back of his throat. “Hmm, yes, and the people who want to tell others what to do are usually the least qualified to do so.” (Not that he’d ever done that, himself, in his own way–Hah! Let’s not be hypocritical, now.) He plopped down on his haunches with a beleaguered sigh. “I suppose we haven’t really talked about it, even after all this time… It must have been terrible, to be driven from the Castle, or to have felt compelled to leave, or however it went. I still don’t understand just how it went. I hardly remember.”

“I hardly remember either,” UrGoh concurred, inching over to him.

“Really, all I remember is–your eyes–and then you were gone.” SkekGra shuddered, a thing that went deeper than his muscles and entrails, realizing that that had been true more than once–himself, this alien, his heart, there and gone–when the light through the Crystal broke them, and again when he’d first encountered UrGoh abroad and the Mystic had turned away from him in their mutual fascination and disgust, and again when the nail ripped through his mind (through their mind) while UrGoh sat placidly by him through that ordeal–And how many times must it happen again, oh Thra, it _would_ happen again, one way or another, wouldn’t it? Death, UrSkek, it didn’t really matter, no outcome could really unmake the fact that he had looked into his own face with such wretchedness and such adoration. He reached out frantically, with all hands, which he didn’t realize until he became aware that he was grasping all four of UrGoh’s hands with his own.

<>-<>-<>

They wend their way through a series of low and awkward tunnels, clearly backroads and hardly able to accommodate them, on the off chance that any of the aforementioned Grottan should be traversing the main roads. The actual abode of the Grottan Gelfling– _Domrak_ , UrLii explains, the term _Caves of Grot_ being something of an overlander slur–is almost half a day’s march south, and they are unlikely to run into anyone, but caution is still the best approach. They wind up in a high-ceilinged repository, a broad hall with tables for researchers to examine objects, which gives way to several long corridors lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves and cabinets. UrLii putters around the shelves for some time, muttering to himself in an expressive but barely audible tone, before deciding upon some particular placement for the heavily cloth-wrapped and cord-bound Glaive; he doesn’t ask exactly what it is or even attempt to pull aside the wrappings, seeming to trust whatever partial explanation has been given to him prior by UrVa and UrGoh despite his earlier show of misgiving.

UrGoh offers some traditional thanks, and SkekGra ventures his own gratitude, weirdly, “You, I think, fractured along the midline.”

“All I fractured was my arm, last time a shelf fell on me,” UrLii responds indifferently.

“Does that happen often?”

“Just the once or twice. It makes life interesting. Something to tell the spiders and hollerbats about.”

SkekGra’s mind veers and tilts momentarily–SkekLi’s voice, with little real gravitas _: Prating hollerbat!_ –and he yanks himself back into the present on that same oddly entwined thread. “Little bit uncoordinated, I take it? Graceful when you actually focus on your movements, the opposite when you focus on anything else.”

UrGoh shoots SkekGra a doubtful look, but UrLii doesn’t seem offended. “Hm. For one I’ve never met, you seem to know somewhat about me. Can you take out your eye, like Mother Aughra, send it rolling about?”

“Don’t jest with a Skeksis about eyes getting taken out. No, I was venturing a guess. You’re–not an insult, please–quite like SkekLi. Some fractured more jaggedly, but you two have more of a symmetry.”

UrLii considers this. He is stringy for an UrRu, stark tendons mapping lengthwise ridges and hollows down his throat. “I haven’t met this person, not since the fracturing in question. Words matter, of course–‘Fractured along the midline,’ is that mathematical or poetical?”

SkekGra dips his head, ever so slightly. “Whichever you like. Geometrically, a circle halved with a clean line instead of a jagged one. Metrically–a spondee, if you prefer. An equal distribution. Even your names.”

“If you mean that more of my edges are closer to some center point, rather than being jaggedly distributed, perhaps that explains why I’m farther from many of the UrRu.”

“How is that?”

“They find me very–erratic. Too talkative. Now I just talk to myself all day, and the scrolls and the tomes and the things that creep amid the depths. It suits me well enough. No one around to vex with my monologue, except when the Maudra drops by. I return to the Valley less and less frequently.“ The Storyteller’s brows lift and crease, his eyes moving a bit perturbedly between UrGoh and SkekGra. “This SkekLi, he is loquacious?”

“Quite. Only way to get him to shut up was to strangle him a bit.”

UrGoh gives SkekGra a weird sidelong look. 

“What? I’ve _told_ you Skeksis get up to some weird shit.”

Either the subtext flies over UrLii’s head or he pretends it does. Or maybe he’s merely more focused on his own concern, which seems to grow as he verbalizes it. “Perhaps you can enlighten me, then, as to what he did–what he _said_ , I’d imagine–that visited this gift on me.” The Mystic opens his mouth to show the same four missing teeth.

SkekGra winces. “Apparently there was a moratorium on uttering my name in the Castle, so naturally Satirist waltzed around flapping his beak about me until someone decided to make an example.” 

UrGoh gives UrLii a sympathetic look, to which the latter answers flippantly, “Well, yes, it hurt quite a very bit. They didn’t actually fall out during, though. Took their time meditating upon their will to continued existence, then gave up and dropped out a few hours later.” 

“Do you still…have them?” the Heretic can’t keep himself asking.

The Storyteller’s snout wrinkles a bit, in distaste or bemusement. “No. That would be pretty morbid though, wouldn’t it, a charming conversation piece?”

“Yeah.”

UrLii’s agitation returns. “I was worried when it happened, and for a long time after. It’s been quite a while now, ninety trine at least? –But, still I’m a bit concerned about this Satirist. What if he says something else and they part him with more teeth, or his tongue? I couldn’t very well speak or sing in that condition. I’d get used to it, I suppose. I would not like it though.”

“Well, I’d think he’s probably more careful now. That outcome wouldn’t like him either, of course. At any rate, he won’t be speaking my name any more, unless to curse me. I–was unkind to him. Didn’t intend to be. Maybe I should have done something differently, but I can’t undo it now.” SkekGra is surprised at the influx of guilt, after all this time. The shelves loom above him, quietly upholding all their history. “I suppose, maybe, I wish I could. I…may have failed our objective, in that small way. I was–worried to even see him, you understand, after what Skeksis did to UrGoh and me.”

UrLii glances at the nail, quickly, respectfully. “I see.”

SkekGra runs a hand along the edge of one of the shelves anxiously. “I couldn’t even make amends now if I wanted to. Seeking him out would mean violating SkekSo’s terms of my banishment. SkekLi could set them all on us for that, if he had a mind to. They know where we are. They only leave us be, in the desert, because they think we haven’t moved from that spot.”

UrLii considers, his head tilted at that weirdly familiar angle. “If I ever see him…I’ll try to talk to him. Don’t know that I’d enjoy it. But there is little to be enjoyed in these trine, and the most dissonant notes must still be sounded.”

<>-<>-<>

“I wish, that my arms–that I could hold you, the way you hold me.”

The multi-hued light from a frosted glass ornament in the window slid over them. Outside, at least one of the suns, probably two, had ducked behind the edge of the earth. 

“You have all your hands now,” UrGoh countered with quiet optimism, all fingers entwined, thirty-two of them. 

“Yes, but…I don’t think these arms are going to ever move properly, even if the nerves and muscles all work right. I’ll need to keep them braced up, hands notwithstanding. There’s something–” SkekGra looked away from the light flashing and changing in his counterpart’s irises as the colors in the window spun languidly. 

“What?”

UrGoh’s tone was so gentle, so free from judgment, that SkekGra winced. It felt violent to even state the simple fact of the matter. “I’ve been looking at the anatomy book, and remembering some stuff the Scientist did on–on Podlings, and–I can feel it for myself, and you can too if you want. When Skeksis bound these auxiliary arms, like I told you, it was enough to fracture the bone in most cases. In this case, it–healed wrong. Bone overcompensated, re-formed itself to excess around the breakage. It’s blocking the proper function of muscles and tendons. I couldn’t move these arms again unless–unless I broke them and re-set them. And even then, it would only be a gamble.”

The Heretic did not even want to glance at his other, but UrGoh craned his neck insistently to peer into SkekGra’s face again. “How much of a gamble?”

“More than enough. I am not– _we_ are not doing that, UrGoh. It’s not worth the risk. I would never forgive us if we both lost those arms.”

“I didn’t lose them the first time.”

“True, but, you told me, it was painful, awful. You were all lucky the fractures and other physical effects of that didn’t transfer over from Skeksis to UrRu. To just break them, point blank, that wouldn’t leave you unchanged. You have a dent in your head, where–”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t the full impact of what happened to you with–”

“Yeah, but we’re not risking that. I’ve gone with two arms most of my life, such as it is. We’re not going to risk changing your form for the worse, on the off chance that mine might change for the better. That’s fucking stupid. I–me, who I am now, not the fucking Conqueror–would never take that kind of idiotic risk. The odds aren’t in our favor.”

“Well, I hate this,” remarked UrGoh, with a petulance that reminded SkekGra too much of himself.

“I don’t fucking like it either. It doesn’t matter. Like I said, maybe I shouldn’t’ve said…I wish I could, but I can’t.” The light playing over their faces was rapidly fading in the oncoming dusk outside the house, the colors donning their veils of grey. “I can only give you my hands. That’s all I can do. All of them are yours, for as long as we draw breath.”

<>-<>-<>

They emerge quietly into the night, by a narrow way nearly obscured with low, scrubby pines, and tilt their heads up to look at the stars and moons. SkekGra is overcome with a more thorough peace than he has felt in many trine. The first part of the plot, at last, is finished, the Shard bestowed without fanfare among the Grottan to await its time, the Glaive that troubled his mind so much–both in its fashioning and in the need for it to leave their own keeping–resting beneath the mountains. There is always some vague peril in being above ground, beyond the desert, but nothing can trouble him in this moment. 

“Now we go see the Sanctuary Tree, like we said,” UrGoh murmurs. They creep over the angular terrain, up and down, trending slightly downslope, the celestial bodies reeling slowly above them, through the night. They rest during the day, carefully hidden in a small ravine beneath a fallen tree draped in plush moss on its northern flank. By the middle of the next night, the promontory capping the Grottan settlement Domrak has come into view, the Tree like a sentinel at its apex. The copious pink blossoms, vivid by day, have no discernable color in the dark. Even at a distance, the movement of the boughs can be discerned; they seem to sway constantly, immutably, more than one would expect given the lightness of the breeze.

The two walk around the base of the steep hill, hardly daring to breathe. This is said to be a sacred entity, its roots extending down to places deep and strange as the sky touched by its blossoms is clear and bright. It is said that the Tree grants visions, premonitions, voices, sundry brands of numinous experiences (not always when one seeks them out, and other times whether one wants them or not). The Heretic and the Wanderer know full well that it is said because it is so. 

“Where exactly is it,” SkekGra says quietly, “that we met? I thought maybe we would…remember.”

“I thought so too. These rocks and brush all look alike though.”

“It was on the western flank here, somewhere.” A few of the petals drift by on the breeze, seeming almost deliberately to brush both of their noses lightly, but deliver no shattering insight this time. SkekGra’s breath hitches. “This Tree was very kind to us.”

“Well…no. It showed us something. It had its own reasons,” UrGoh says placidly, but he’s interlaced his fingers with SkekGra’s and he also seems to be trembling.

“I don’t care if we’re–cogs in Thra’s machinations. I’ll still call it kind. What would I have been, if I hadn’t met you? I mean, of course, we’d ‘met’ already, many times, but I consider that to be the first time I met you as something other than–what I was.”

“I think so. And we met many more times, after, as something other than what we were.” UrGoh’s voice takes on that light timbre he tends to use when posing some nonsensical riddle, although this time it actually makes sense, in some way that can’t be worded in any other way. “And we’re meeting, now, as something other still. And I will continue to meet you. We’re always new.”

SkekGra crouches down to his counterpart’s eye level, noses touching, and stares at him, barely able to speak for the–what is this? If it is joy, it hurts, it is unbearable. “I am so happy to meet you.”

<><><>

They go up to the Sanctuary Tree this time, trusting implicitly that there is no danger in this place whether that’s wise or no, wander among its roots for a long time. The faint vanguard of dawn has just begun to define the Tree’s shadow when they fall asleep, limbs and roots curled together, facing west.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re: Chapter title. 
> 
> [This song, "Dark Night of the Soul" by Loreena McKennitt, comes highly recommended,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MnEwaSdlnk&list=PLRl_veE2aUGSOpKtjuIx2jMTeDb87hlxH&index=65) the lines in question being:  
>  _Shrouded by the night  
>  And by the secret stair I quickly fled  
> The veil concealed my eyes  
> While all within lay quiet as the dead_
> 
> McKennitt's song was [based on a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, if anyone is interested in such matters. This is a big mood for this story.](https://josvg.home.xs4all.nl/cits/lm/stjohn01.html)


	11. The Stones Will Wake Up and Speak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How the “Lore” project wrapped up.

More than fifty trine of experimentation have yielded tenuous results. UrGoh is able to sing under his breath to the stones, causing them to stir gently and slowly (a thing SkekGra watches with endless fascination), but nothing approaching what they need to do–to coax the stones into assembling themselves into a truly motile entity that might speak. SkekGra has been trying to figure out how to make them speak. It eventually becomes painfully evident that they cannot speak from their hypothetical mouth via anatomical means. The detail required for such a thing, a great deal of clockwork and hinges and tiny components, is a bit too ambitious considering the stones have also been purposed to serve as a guide and a guardian to Gelfling; they may come into contact with resistance and violence, and they cannot be gracile in any of their features. 

Then, there will need to be a recording, a limited repertoire of phrases. Just as well, since creating a fully sentient being capable of subjective speech is rather beyond the Heretic and Wanderer. A canned recording can be activated by specific stimuli (say, words that might be expected to vacate someone’s mouth in the process of successfully solving the particular riddle posed to them). That doesn’t need to be gracile. There is a way to do it, involving notches etched carefully into spinning cylinders, activated by a needle; and a sharply-honed stone point at the end of one forearm might also do “Lore” some good insofar as its other function of protecting the riddle-solver.   
  
“You should do the message,” says UrGoh.  
  
“Yes, me, with my lovely and melodious voice,” squawks SkekGra.

“Well, who else is going to do it? I could, but–”

“You talk too slow.”

“–I talk–”

“ _Yes,_ point taken!”

“–too…”

“Too slow!”

…slow.”

“Would you stop that? It’s not funny.”

“It is funny. You get annoyed and puff up. Your wrath is endearing.”

SkekGra remembers the first time UrGoh said something similar, along their anguished road out from the Castle of the Crystal and into this exile, maybe one hundred and fifty trine ago. That journey had been harried by pain, guilt, fear, and resentment–and yet, remembering it now, those parts recede into shadow, and all he recalls was that the journey was beautiful, that his and UrGoh’s paths had become one path then. He stills his irritation and smooths his ruff back down. “All right. Fine. I’ll do the message.”

_<><><>_

Message to Gelfling, Draft I

_“Don’t fucking shit yourself–This creature is Lore. And while he may seem threatening, you are perfectly safe.”_

“Good…”

“But?”

“…Instead of ‘don’t fucking shit yourself,’ use ‘be not afraid.’”

_<><><>_

There is a pile of river-worn stones in their staging area, small boulders really, hard come by in fits and starts, hued to match the grey metaphoric rock of the mountains cradling Ha’rar. Their number was specifically designated, based upon the finalized version of a long succession of sketches and diagrams, and obtained variously by the efforts of UrVa, UrLii, and a couple by UrGoh’s Dousan contacts who have been left naive of their purpose (and even of where UrGoh abides, let alone whom with). When all is said and done though, the stones’ shape and size relative to each other leaves a bit to be desired, and thus new sketches need to be made. 

They have been working on this nearly seventy trine since they handed the Glaive over to the Storyteller. SkekGra frets about the time quite a bit more than UrGoh does. “Skeksis are devouring this world, the trine pass, we failed our initial objective and our second project is taking far too long,” he murmurs into the comfortable space around the Mystic’s collarbone at night.

SkekGra knows that UrGoh knows that it’s true (and that SkekGra knows the particulars of its truth much better than UrGoh ever could–or would want to–know). The UrRu considers solemnly for a bit, then says, “Yes, but we can’t rush it, or it will backfire. That’s what happened the first time. We were so eager to convince the others, we took a great risk in haste. And now, here were are. Now, we can only do what we can do, and that–we’re already doing.”

“I marvel that we were so headstrong about the whole endeavor, thinking we were to convince UrRu and Skeksis. We barely knew each other, we didn’t even really like each other, and we were still so damn sure that we were doing the right thing.”

“The right thing, in the wrong way. We did it because we _did_ know each other, all along.”

<><><>

Lore will definitely look a bit–interesting. Lopsided, ungainly, but somehow appropriate. It will look like the smooth stones cradling the Black River in its downslope rush come alive, the bricks of Ha’rar given mind, the awkward stack of massive sedimentary stone slabs upon which the Circle of the Suns perches granted will. They incise curving and spiraling designs on the stones, typically sketched in moments of urdrupe but actually chiseled while more sober and coordinated. 

The stones will stir and rattle at UrGoh’s voice, but they won’t come together properly into the shape they need. The diagrams are perfectly to scale, based upon exacting and tedious measurements, so there’s little doubt what Lore would look like if it would only deign to assemble itself. 

While SkekGra ponders, attempts, and fails numerous solutions to the articulation problem, UrGoh has the good sense to realize that there can be no singing the stones awake once they’ve been placed in Ha’rar for the finding of the proper Gelfling. Singing the stones into shape is a moot point, given that fact. The song will need be transferred to some kind of device that can wake the stones up at the right moment, perhaps the same device that is to respond to certain encoded words and trigger the articulation process. The UrRu disappears into the Breath of Thra for the better part of several days, before coming up with a clearish-green gemstone that seems to glow with some faint inner light of its own. They poke and prod the thing with various incantations, tools, alchemical concoctions, until the stones shiver when the device is placed upon one of them.

_<><><>_

Message to Gelfling, Draft II

_“Be not afraid--This creature is Lore. And while he may seen threatening, you are perfectly safe. I mean, assuming you're alive to listen to this message, then you are perfectly safe. This thing is dangerous when it articulates, almost crushed our skull more than once. Hope you Gelfling move swift, look sharp. Well, fuck, I just had quite the morbid thought: What if your head was smashed like a gourd in the articulation process, and now poor Lore is delivering his message to a mangled carcass? How grisly, how tragic for you, for us all, for Thra. Poor little Gelfl--”_

“SkekGra–!” 

“Damn, UrGoh, _what?_ ”

“I remember exactly what you said, before: ‘It’s rather imposing, isn’t it? Wouldn’t want it to alarm our potential Gelfling envoy. We should make a _comforting_ message.’ –Comforting!”

“I–had no idea you could do such a good imitation of my voice?”

_<><><>_

Twenty-odd trine more gone, and the stones have yet to come together. “Aha!” SkekGra yells, jerking his face up from a book he’s been poring over, so suddenly that he knocks noggins with UrGoh seated beside him.

“This better be good,” the Mystic comments, rubbing the ride of his head.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” SkekGra rubs his own head gently against the other’s. “I think maybe I have it. What we’re going to need now is…”

Iron, and lodestone. Lodestone for directional orientation, a way to guide Lore back to the Circle of the Suns, and also for its magnetic properties. Different quantities of the materials are melded into the stones, to draw them to one another, their properties also sung into the activation device. Several more trine fritter away in this phase. On the first few test runs, the stones drag reluctantly toward each other, a hint of a limb twitching on the floor over here and a salamander-like head open and closing its toothless mouth over here. 

They overcompensate during the next series of experiments, shrieking and ducking flying stones that careen recklessly toward each other through the air. “Agh, fuck, shit, gah!” howls SkekGra, alarmed and oddly exhilarated, throwing himself and UrGoh to the floor just in time to avoid the arm with its single sharp needle-finger gouging yet another hole in his head. Two of the larger pieces, from the torso, sail toward each other, the more massive of the two sweeping the other away in its own momentum and clear out the door; those two arc out over the edge of the porch and are eventually heard to connect with the sands far below in a dull thump. 

“Okay, well, too much this time.” SkekGra considers that they should go retrieve the stones at once (and what a fun task that will be, lugging them back up here). But, really, no hurry. It feels nice to lay entangled on the floor with UrGoh, having narrowly avoided death. Just like old times, he thinks with a bemused snicker. He grabs UrGoh, who is still apparently minded to bring the errant stones back immediately, and pulls him back down on top of him on the floor, nibbling at his mane. “They can wait.”

“Almost killed us that time,” protests UrGoh, unamused by SkekGra’s sudden affections.

“Yes, yes, that just means we’ve established what isn’t enough, and also what’s too much. We’ll be closer to right, next time. They’re stones, they not going anywhere. You’re right, we work too hard, we think too much. I–miss you.” The Skeksis takes the UrRu’s face in his hands, licking him more fervently along the side of the muzzle. 

UrGoh’s protests evaporate pretty quickly. He leans in with a faint sigh, one of both pleasure and exasperation. “You always get your way.”

“You’re the one who gets to be right about everything, I’m the one who gets my way. Fair’s fair.”

_<><><>_

Message to Gelfling, Draft III  
  
_“Be not afraid--This creature is Lore. And while he may seen threatening, you are perfectly safe.  
Now Lore will guide you to the answers you seek. You have solved our riddle. Understand that Skeksis have sought to obscure the truth you have discerned, for their own petty ends–and–I mean, these bastards are complete fucking shitbirds, disingenuous, covetous, vicious, obsessively fearful of death….Wouldn’t Dousan have a good laugh about that, if they really _knew _what was going on? I mean, frankly, a couple of their envoys did smirk in my face, back in the day. Skeksis are scared of those little fuckers, I shit you not–”_

“SkekGra.”

“ _Yes.”_

“I’m sure this is all very therapeutic _,_ but…”

“Fine, fine. Fucking slave-driver.”

_<><><>_

There is Lore, a complete creature, or at least a functional shambling pile with certain behavioral quirks that might qualify it as a creature. Deeming that this character must be reasonably acclimated and socialized for the duties that lie ahead of it, they keep it around for several trine more. Usually it’s deactivated, as it becomes unnerving to have it wandering slowly about the Circle of the Suns with its aimless sort of gentle curiosity, only activating it for its varied training regimens. They talk to it, teach it greetings, courteous responses, non-threatening postures. After Lore seems to understand all of this, they take it out into the desert and have it run about, sending it over obstacles of rock and crystalline monoliths. The thing can certainly move fast when it senses that is its task, hurtling over boulders or across gaps, its components separating slightly during exertion but coming back together with seamless thuds when it falls still again. 

“We–we really did quite well, didn’t we?” SkekGra says early one evening, watching their odd creation swerve to avoid an impact with a stray daeydoim that had appeared out of nowhere over a dune. Lore skids to a halt with a cascading wave of sand, then levers its neck–such as it is–back up, and cants its head toward the daeydoim with the look of a child hoping to gentle a semi-feral fizzgig. The animal, however, is having none of it and bolts awkwardly back behind the dune whence it’d emerged. 

UrGoh sends a long puff of smoke up into the desert air. “We did.”

The last experiments are to confirm the navigational component. One of them (usually SkekGra, being faster on his feet and low on patience) will lead Lore out into the desert by night, several miles out, and send it home, the other watching from the porch as Lore finds various means of scaling the sheer rock walls. Lore can climb up the walls more quickly than simply going up the path. Good, good, useful in the event of pursuit.

<><><>

Because designing the content and configuration of the puzzle is taking longer than anticipated, Lore is stuck with them for a while more. They continue its various drills and exercises with less intensity, focusing more on the minutiae of building a three-dimensional puzzle around the riddle: _Thra’s true balance will be found when natural order is sound._

After one long evening engrossed in debates and reams of pages with color-coded diagrams, the Skeksis and UrRu retire to their bed, the frustration and excitement of working on such a convoluted and potentially important project following them there, setting them twining and biting lightly, clinging and gasping against each other. In the middle of emitting a particularly impassioned and probably very undignified sound, SkekGra glances up and notes the familiar awkward figure standing at the edge of the loft and watching them with its typical expressionless yet somehow expressive tilted head. “Mmrmgh–AHG! ‘Thra’s sake!” the Skeksis interrupts himself, his voice still trembling with the residue of his rudely cut-off moan. 

“What?!” UrGoh looks up, alarmed for an instant, then sees what SkekGra is looking at and laughs. 

“Yeah, really funny, hilarious, we’ve got a fucking voyeur on our hands.”

“He’s just-–curious. We made him to be curious. Doubt he has any notion of what he’s even looking at.”

“Somehow I doubt that. Creepy blockheaded pervert. He must get that from you,” huffs SkekGra.

“Big talk. I thought you’d mentioned Skeksis weren’t above a bit of exhibitionism.”

“Another world, another time. Now?–I would just like a fucking moment alone with my UrRu, _okay,_ Lore?” SkekGra, craning over UrGoh’s shoulder, points an accusing talon. Lore sinks halfway down to its haunches, tilting its head back and forth. “That too fucking much to ask? Eh? _Lore?!_ ”

“He doesn’t get it. Just go deactivate him. Why didn’t you do that earlier?”

“Why didn’t _you_?”

“I suppose we forgot.”

SkekGra grumbles, glowering at the creature standing there like an oversized pet muski or fizzgig, oblivious to its own impropriety. He throws a blanket over his shoulders, somehow unnerved by this “pet” observing his nakedness. “Fine. Lore, come. Step lightly. You shouldn’t even be on the ramp. We’ve been over this. You’ll break it.” Indeed, the ramp groans uneasily at their descent. “Open,” commands SkekGra, quickly snatching the device from the stone entity’s mouth, leaving it in a pile on a rug.

_<><><>_

Message to Gelfling, Draft IV  
  
_“Be not afraid--This creature is Lore. And while he may seen threatening, you are perfectly safe.  
Now Lore will guide you to the answers you seek. You have solved our riddle. Understand that Skeksis have sought to obscure the truth you have discerned, for their own petty ends, and that they will soon follow if you undertake this journey. So travel swift.  
Evade Skeksis if they daunt you with arms, trust them not if they cajole you with words. They are not what they seem. For many, many trine, they have tightened their grip upon the Gelfling in Thra. I’m sure you have many questions._

_Lore has imprinted on you; he is now your guardian, and will provoke you on your journey to the–place, um–Circle of the Suns. There you will find the skew to keying Gelfl–the– ‘Thra’s sake, I am way too high for this nonsense.”_

“I told you not to work on it right now.”

“Yes. Wonderful. Bask in your perpetual correctness about every damn thing, UrGoh.”

“‘ _Keying_ Gelfling?’”

“Is that what I said? Pity me, my heart. I cannot now with the…the words, fucking words.”

“Tsk. Leave that alone and come sit with me.”

_<><><>_

There has been an agreement between the exiles and their UrRu associates, that not too many details will be revealed between them. Their machinations may eventually skirt or initiate or intersect with war (not ideally, but, realistically), and during such times it’s best that knowledge residing in any given member of a resistance remain incomplete; the less to be extracted under duress. SkekGra certainly knows this from experience, from the vantage of the entity being resisted, that obsolete and strange life of cold calculation and impassioned will to power that seems ever more surreal and revolting as time passes–and, yet, always, disconcertingly, it somehow remains too familiar even in its ugliness, like a recurring cyst. He was the one to initially insist upon division and compartmentalization of duties, which UrVa agreed to out of tactical savvy and UrLii out of natural secrecy.   
  
Thus, it isn’t clear to UrGoh or SkekGra exactly how an ingress under the throne room of Ha’rar was discerned or whom among the Vapra was bought off or convinced to turn a blind eye and ear to the tappings and gratings in the dead of night. It had certainly taken long enough, thirty-odd trine after the puzzle was completed, for the opportunity to present itself. All they know is that the Grottan and Vapran are evidently more closely related than most outside of those clans have any inkling of, that some Gelfling genealogist among one of the two clans had an in of some sort. Being that Vapran and Grottan evince a special disdain for each other, the thought that at least a couple of them are able to flout their conditioning is encouraging.

They tinker around in the cavern by night for nearly an unum, not every night for fear of consistent strange noises being noticed by some Gelfling late patrol, receding behind a sliding rock panel and into a tunnel leading back down to the Breath of Thra when they aren’t at work. The end result is immensely satisfying–A door beneath an arch engraved with the riddle, Lore’s activation device concealed in the doorknob, the puzzle of the seven Gelfling clan sigils arrayed along the round wall, the disarticulated pieces of Lore lying at the room’s center among other more mundane rocks. 

They stand surveying the room, back to back, turning around slowly, awed as much by the thought that they can finally rest as by the pride of their own handiwork. Then they duck under the egress, shoulder-to-shoulder, the stone panel sliding closed behind them, and neither Lore nor rumor follows them back to the desert.

_<><><>_

Message to Gelfling, Final Draft  
  
_“Be not afraid--This creature is Lore. And while he may seen threatening, you are perfectly safe.  
Now Lore will guide you to the answers you seek. You have solved our riddle. Understand that Skeksis have sought to obscure the truth you have discerned, for their own petty ends, and that they will soon follow if you undertake this journey. So travel swift.  
Evade Skeksis if they daunt you with arms, trust them not if they cajole you with words. They are not what they seem. For many, many trine, they have tightened their grip upon the Gelfling in Thra. I’m sure you have many questions._

_Lore has imprinted on you; he is now your guardian, and will protect you on your journey to the Circle of the Suns. There you will find the key to freeing Gelfling from Skeksis power forever.”_

“Perfect. Don’t change it.”

_<><><>_

The Circle of the Suns seems quiet, strangely empty despite the many trine of accumulated stuff, without Lore or unfurled maps or tables stacked with notes and books.

The stand in the doorway. “So. We’re–free,” tries SkekGra, not sure how to feel about the sudden roaring void where their self-imposed obligations had dwelt for most of their acquaintance.

“We’re always free.”

“Yes, yes. But, free to do–whatever it is we do, when we’re not fleeing Skeksis, or forging the trappings of knowledge and rebellion, or skulking the deepways of Thra.”

UrGoh glances up and speaks jestingly, gently, but maybe with some note of real concern. “Are you going to wither away without a project, birdling?”

“Maybe, in time–?” SkekGra absently runs his talons through the other’s hair (getting a little duller, a little thinner, with the reelings of the seasons, for them both, but that’s little matter). “I mean, it’s a relief, for now. I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking tired. We could start by sleeping for half an unum.”

They begin to walk slowly through their house, looking at the furniture and tapestries and tools and talismans as if these things are all somehow novel. “Now there will be time for other projects,” points out UrGoh.

“More fun projects!”

“Yeah, like the puppet show.”

“Oh that’s right, we were actually going to give the history to our Gelfling in the form of a puppet show, weren’t we?” SkekGra laughs in delight, then pauses a little dubiously. “Do you think they’ll like that though?”

“They are _going_ to like it,” says UrGoh a bit darkly, an imitation of SkekGra’s tone during his more steely moods. Both burst out laughing.  
  
“And then,” appends UrGoh, more soberly, “when Gelfling have been told of the Glaive, things may begin to move again. We won’t be sitting that out, will we?”

“Of course not.”

“So, we should enjoy things–”

“While we can–”

“While there is quiet.”   
  
That evening, they clamber up to their precarious perch on the pinnacle to watch the suns set, blissfully free of plans, aware only of the decreasing angles and hues of the falling light, and the wind, and each the breathing and tangled limbs of the other. It is like being new again. It will pass, as everything does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made up part of Lore’s message, being unable to discover whether the full text of it exists anywhere; if it does, for Thra’s sake, do enlighten me. 
> 
> This was a transitional chapter, planned out for a long time to mark the end of one arc. Next up - a changed timeline, since the present and past timelines have essentially been made to run almost congruent (this was also planned for a long time, and has caused me plenty of confusion as the very selfsame asshole writing it). Present tense will continue on into AoR–era, and past tense will do something totally different.


	12. Through the Blood Spew Heavens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the air changed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since my two timelines have confused my own self on numerous occasions, I wanted to note that the present-tense timeline continues here in the general direction of the overall story, while the past-tense timeline just does something totally different from here on out.
> 
> Relevantly: More Skeksis-centric portions going forward (it was probably inevitable, even if I didn’t realize it when I started this, given…me), so have a chapter warning: Fairly graphic/lengthy depiction of violence toward an animal.

SkekGra apportions his life into three, appropriately enough given the fixation of his people of origin upon the triangular, three points upholding three lines and angles as though upon the strings of a particularly complex puppet. There was the time with the Skeksis, when he numbered among them, advanced their agenda, partook of their praise and censure; there was the time, with UrGoh when their unity was novel, when they flew together upon the momentum of their mutual trauma and desire for change, worked to lay the groundwork of that change; and there is this time, when he and UrGoh have rested long, waiting for the world to move now that they two have ceased to. The three times are broadly equal in their span, give or take fifty trine, but his and UrGoh’s flurry of planning and movement was the shortest–and this, their rest, SkekGra thinks has become the longest. He has been what he is, an exile, a Heretic, and a passive acquiescent part of two halves, longer than he has done anything else. The Skeksis portion of his existence can barely account for one-third of it, yet he still feels them, an irrevocable rebuff, a warning, an occasional itch for fellowship of a sort UrGoh can neither provide nor understand, an occasional relief and wild gratitude when their memory and its horror is accompanied by the knowledge that he has forsaken them for good. Yes, _they_ forsook him too, but SkekGra invited it, of his own will, in ways he could hardly fathom the implications of until the fallout unfurled through the delirious wood and into the Crystal Desert, here to this lonely pinnacle. Here, he is completely alone, forsaken, having forsaken, and yet he is never alone. Always, he is with himself, and his self is more forgiving and stern and pliant than he could ever have fathomed, before.

<>-<>-<>

“Do not approach them,” SkekSo addressed the others with the authority he’d shrugged into like a mantle early on. He’d been the only one of them who had been enough self-possessed (self? This was still new, a self, something horrifying and dearly bought and to be preserved by any means) to instill some kind of order after the “them” in question were fled or driven out. SkekSo had in fact taken it upon himself, after some cursory division of labor had been established in the Castle, to leave and seek out the other ones, to treat with them and ensure it was clear they would not be attempting a return. 

“…Why?” SkekGra ventured. He remembered the amorphous chaos all too well, them being not even a trine out from the–the _incident_ –, remembered the agony of looking into the eyes of that other, but he didn’t wholly associate the others with the chaos. The chaos seemed to have happened to them, to the Skeksis and the others _both,_ or somehow arisen _from_ them both. He was willing, however, to be convinced that the others were to blame; after all, that would be easier to wrap the mind around, than to try to understand why the others were so haunting and why the Skeksis sometimes hurt for no discernable reason.

SkekSo stalked up to him, peering down his beak with his odd combination of arched brows and hooded eyes. “I’m sure you _know_ why, you remember why. Do you not trust me, what I saw?” 

“Well, I–” SkekGra got a sense that something was odd here, that SkekSo’s words followed some convoluted reasoning, but he couldn’t quite put a talon on it. “We don’t _know_ what you saw, SkekSo.” 

SkekSo gave a perfunctory nod and turned his intense gaze away from SkekGra, resuming his slow pacing among the group of fifteen gathered around him and locking eyes with each in turn as he spoke. “I’m getting to that, of course. I only wished to give you a warning. They are dangerous. They are simple and rustic, but arrogant. Their kind is called UrRu–”

At this, something like a half-remembered dream twitched in SkekGra’s consciousness, and apparently in many of the others’: “ _UrSkek_ ,” the whisper erupted among them, seeming to echo off the chamber walls despite its low volume. 

Pausing as if to reflect, SkekSo studied something in the middle distance, then resumed his focus on them. “Yes. That is what they said. They said that all of us come from these–UrSkek–one of us for each of them, that they and we are each of us one UrSkek split in two.”

Hisses and murmurs rustled. It made sense of their awful beginning, and, more critically, it was immediately perceived instinctively as the truth. “How hideous!” SkekEkt opined shrilly.

“Yes,” SkekSo agreed with a fervent nod. “It’s awful. It’s degrading, to think we came about that way, that we share that origin with them–But, listen! The UrRu tried to convince me that it was some mistake, some error on the part of these UrSkek. But I– _I_ see the truth they wish to hide. We are _better_ for being split from them, and no longer having a part in that sundered being. Never speak with these UrRu, avoid them at all cost, as they will seek to lead you astray from the truth. Skeksis are the stronger part. _We_ have been rid of our dullness, our weakness, and _we_ are the ones who have the Crystal. These others may fade, but _we_ will live on for all of time!”

<>-<>-<>  
  
  
UrGoh and SkekGra are rehearsing the puppet show, as they do at odd intervals, to keep themselves in practice. After all, one never knows when their puzzle in Ha’rar might be uncovered, when the stones might rise and speak and deliver to them a Gelfling of a clever sort. Wouldn’t do to be out of practice, to forget the lines!

_“I lied, I cursed, I_ –”

“You still curse. All the time,” UrGoh says unhelpfully.

“Well, that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, now does it? ‘I lied, I still curse all the fucking time, I killed, I hurt, I maimed.’ Bad form. Throws off the meter.”

“If Gelfling come, will you try not to curse in front of them?” 

“ _When_ Gelfling come,” says SkekGra, projecting a bit more certainty than he feels. “I suppose, I’ll try. Maybe I could get into another habit, like, say, laughing maniacally?”

“You already do that, too.”

“I do? Since when?”

“Maybe hundred trine, bit more.” UrGoh tries to be helpful: “We are all alone here. It gets weird. Stir crazy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“I…don’t know. I suppose it started gradually, and I got used to it. It’s kind of cute.”

“I’m sure. I’m sure Gelfling will find me very cute,” SkekGra yells with a flourish. 

UrGoh’s expression grows briefly dreary, and then he says optimistically, “You actually don’t curse nearly as much as you used to.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra enjoyed being abroad. The Castle of the Crystal was a place both comforting and repressive, too familiar yet bizarrely inappropriate to hang about in for protracted periods. He preferred to get out, usually via his own two feet rather than riding a phegnese as many of the others did on ventures longer than a couple miles. He liked being on his own at length, but he was also curious about anyone and anything he encountered that could be spoken with, and thus he tended to present as sociable even when he felt little emotional resonance; this somewhat paradoxical combination made it easy for him to travel among the peoples of Thra, to gain knowledge of them without becoming attached to them. This interested SkekSo, their de facto leader, a great deal–SkekSo was forever wondering who was saying what and where, who was thinking what and why, plying SkekGra for details over drinks and scuttling delicacies.

SkekGra was aware that SkekSo, as ever, had his own reasons for this favor, and all of it troubled him little. Let SkekSo worry these frayed political ends to his heart’s content. It was slightly funny to SkekGra, who cared for others’ thoughts and words and dealings to the extent that they were interesting, no more and no less. They might bore him (perhaps the better for them), or they might hold his interest long enough for him to feel a certain disinvested dotage or a quite darker sentiment; it all depended on the circumstances, and on his mood. If he did care to evoke a response, it was purely quantitative, a matter of _degree_ , gratitude and respect being similar to unease and fear. The differences in _hue_ didn’t trouble SkekGra’s mind. Many of the sentient creatures with whom he interfaced drew a distinction between the “wrong” and the “right,” a pattern that couldn’t be missed when he jotted down words in a logbook in his amateur philological endeavors. His own mind, however, didn’t quite grasp the right-wrong concept insofar as it seemed to exist on some spectrum. What, after all, was the difference between green and blue? Who decided when a greenish-blue became more of a bluish-green? 

It might be pleasant to evoke smiles and bows from the sentient beings, and happy chirrups or grunts from the animals when they were tossed some dainty, but it was equally pleasant (granted, this hadn’t been proven as far as the sentient beings went, beyond a tacit intimidation) to sow their entrails across the dirt and see the alarm as the spark left their eyes like the setting moons. It was very interesting, riveting really, it–held the attention, to take something that had been distinguished by the characteristic of life and transform it into something in which that trait had been extinguished. 

<><><>

SkekGra was out in the foothills, still early on, twelve trine out from their newness maybe, a day’s march south of the castle where the hills slowly ducked their crowns into the plains. He’d discovered a landstrider that had wandered a bit farther off from its herd than was typical, grazing more upland than the pale shuffling blot of its aggregation–an outlier, perhaps, like himself. Rather than consuming the tall grasses below and whatever tiny things crawled among those grasses, this one had decided to glean moss from the boulders that rapidly became more numerous as the land rose. SkekGra left his pack and cloak by one such rock, impediments to his stealth, and dropped low on his four limbs (the other two were becoming irrelevant, bound up into a still-aching obscurity to avoid what SkekSo had pointed out was an undignified semblance to UrRu, to some six-legged strains of crawlies, to other unsavory creatures, which obviously Skeksis ought to be above).

He inched closer through the tall grass, considering, enjoying the visceral anticipation of a fight as well as the calculation of the deed. The landstrider was tall enough for him to walk under, but it was mostly leg. Moreover, the legs were the most dangerous part. The hindlimbs were also closer to him, within easier lunging grasp than its underbelly or throat. The suns and the breeze were pleasant, the soft hiss and caress of the swaying grass. SkekGra sprung up of a sudden, twice his own body length, seizing the startled thing just above the hock of its left hindlimb almost before it realized its danger. He clamped his jaws shut on either side of the long tendon, thrashing his head violently in a bid to tear it and cripple the animal. Having anticipated its attempt to kick him or shake him off, he sank his talons into its thigh and seized its long tarsal segment with his legs and tail; he was raised from the ground a little, clinging too tightly to be dislodged, and the landstrider, now unbalanced, lurched and staggered, nearly falling on him as it scrabbled to keep from crashing to the earth. The Skeksis continued worrying at the tendon, the noises of the animal becoming frantic and enraged. It attempted to thrash him against the ground, which he barely noticed even though his leg grazed heavily against a rock that tore it open. He was so fucking close to the objective, and it was the same satisfaction that came from learning a new word or any other task well done when the tendon began to give. He felt and heard the beginning of its popping tearing, amid the blood running down into his mouth and dripping from its corners, and gave a final sidelong-and-downward jerk of his head. The creature screamed and fell. SkekGra let out something between a laugh and a howl, jumping out of the way. 

He tumbled into the grass and looked up eagerly. The landstrider herd on the plain below was moving rapidly away, not quite stampeding but concerned enough to put immediate distance between themselves and their fellow’s mischance. His quarry, surprisingly quick despite the unwieldy impediment its limbs became while it was down, had gained its remaining three legs and was attempting to lurch away dragging the useless one behind it. “Hah!” SkekGra growled, panting, moving back in to perform the same maneuver on the other hindlimb.

The landstrider, wise to this strategy now, rounded on SkekGra when it heard his close pursuit, extending a raised foreleg and making to bring a hoof down on his head while he was still at some distance. He dodged, catching the creature’s frantic eyes amidst its bristling mane and quivering barbels, and sprang in for its other forelimb while it was dealing with the recoil of its missed strike. He tore a chunk of fat and fascia from the fleshy area under its lofty elbow, the upward-hooked posterior barbs on the leg just below him gashing his flank, and darted away. The landstrider was teetering now like a drunken reveler. SkekGra watched it with interest, chewing on what he’d just taken from it. The instantaneous dawning of its understanding that it was down by one and a half legs, hardly fit for either flight or fight, was _tangible_ , beautiful. Its head veered left and right, bellowing quietly, looking for some escape or answer. 

“Your friends have all left you, eh?” SkekGra said conversationally, blood and spittle and tiny chunks of flesh flying as he spoke with his mouth full. “That’s a shame. That’s why Skeksis don’t have friends. Just us, now. Will you entertain me for a bit before I return you to your Thra?”

<><><>

It took quite a while to quell the landstrider, although the first two blows in the midst of its startlement had disabled its defenses significantly. The thrashing legs had numerous barbs and bony protuberances, and it its kind was wilier than one was inclined to give them credit for. SkekGra was heavily bruised and gashed, and had possibly broken his tail near the end but was too steeped in adrenaline to care, by the time he managed to access the animal’s underbelly and rip it open. The landstrider bellowed ululantly, a skin-crawling yet piteous sound. 

This was good, wonderful, no Skeksis had brought down a landstrider singlehandedly before, let alone with no weapon save the teeth and claws they’d come with. SkekGra planned vaguely in the back of his mind, even while rejoicing mindlessly in the new sights and scents and tastes unleashed by this rending: he’d bring back some meat to the Castle for a feast, of course; and a couple of the longbones back to gift to SkekSo and SkekTek, respectively, for quite different purposes; subtly wave all this in the face of SkekMal (presuming that one would even be in the Castle, he rarely was these days); stow the hide somewhere and come back to retrieve it later for SkekEkt to play with; tell SkekOk and SkekLi all about it in poetic detail–

The landstrider gave a particularly violent twitch and then seemed to subside a bit. SkekGra, his beak and indeed his entire face covered in gore, drew his head out of its open body cavity and crept up onto it chest to peer at it. It was hard to read the faces of most of these creatures (which was sometimes frustrating–if he could really read them, would that stay his hand, or provoke him further?), but there was something like contempt in its amber eyes as he peered at it. It tried to turn its head away from him, gave up, turned the dying eyes away instead. The suns-light refracted off of the eyes for a moment, a narrowing crescent, as the animal closed them in defeat, then brightened the pale creased flesh of its eyelids. 

“Hmmh,” SkekGra muttered, fixated, rather wishing it could have _talked_ to him as it died. He sniffed at its face, at the drooping barbels that could both smell and touch in fine detail, briefly felt as though something might be amiss and glanced around but there was no danger to be seen. He prowled the length of the animal’s prone form, sniffing and pawing and licking at it to note how warm something could still feel, initially, while it was so very dead, how there was not a jot of resistance in it anymore _due to him._ He shoved his head back into the entrails, tearing more flesh aside to rip off and gulp down a bit of muscle meat, then starting to tear farther up, toward the lungs and heart. Everything reeked and smelled delicious, and still so fucking warm. He half growled, half mewled aloud in unadulterated pleasure, rolling on his back in the mess, the suns and the breeze so very beautiful–

Shit, there _was_ someone there. SkekGra felt it before he saw it, a sense almost that he’d been ripped from his own body and was observing himself, and he was horrified by himself. That lasted the barest fraction of an instant; he sprang immediately to his fours, now nothing but resentful at the intrusion.

Yes, someone was peeking out of the grass, slowly moving toward him with a pained air, as though they would really rather not but were afforded no choice.

This–person–Oh, SkekGra knew this person, he knew this alien too well, he knew nothing about him and yet he despised him with familiarity (and–yet again–). He growled low in his throat, vibrating with it, bristling as the UrRu came nearer.   
  
_Do not remember that moment, do not remember what happened then–_

The UrRu shuffled up to him with a slowness that would have been tedious under most circumstances, but now only attenuated to the point of near madness whatever (fear?) horrible wound seemed to be driving itself into the Skeksis. It was such a bizarre creature, very ugly, ungainly, soft, and with eyes that were likewise fucking _soft_ –no, eyes that were _terrible_.   
  
The UrRu, hunched somewhat in its posture and thus just above eye level with SkekGra who was still standing drawn up to his full quadrupedal height, was almost nose to nose with him now. Something should be done about this, he should attack it (no! That would be impractical, and, also–a sacrilege–?), he should run away ( _no_ , of course not), he should at least–he should at least speak first. 

But the UrRu (his own UrRu, this terrible thing), slow though it was, beat him to it. Its eyes shone in the suns like the dying landstrider’s had, but it would not die anytime soon, SkekGra couldn’t even make an attempt on its life. It bore some cuts and bruises, of lesser degree but probably placed exactly where his own were. “You–” The UrRu considered at some minor length, and still the Skeksis couldn’t speak. “–are a foul creature.”

SkekGra felt his beak gape a bit, as though minded to snarl or laugh in derision. The masque of gore on his face was itching as the suns attempted to dry it. He felt as though the earth had dropped out from under him, and dug his talons into the dirt to ground himself. “I–do not welcome you,” he rasped. “Take your judgment elsewhere. I renounce you.”

He’d been feeling as though the UrRu had the upper hand, having snuck up on him with all its quiet sanctimoniousness (its– _grief–_ not his own, not SkekGra’s, grief was nothing he had the time nor the humor for). He could swear he felt himself shaking like a leaf. But now the UrRu paused, perhaps that was its mistake, the hesitation, allowing itself that temporal gap where overthinking and weakness could flow in. “You _can’t_ –” it began, staring at him with pitiful sincerity. 

“I _will_. You heard me. I renounce you. I renounce everything but myself. _Mine._ My will.”

The UrRu’s brow furrowed deeply. The sheen of grief, thankfully, receded. It looked at him with a sere contempt, which suited SkekGra just fine, the feeling being mutual. “This is beyond anyone’s will, SkekGra.” It eyed him for a long moment more, during which the Skeksis could hardly feel his own body, then turned and trundled away.

How had it known his name? What did UrRu know about Skeksis, that Skeksis hadn’t bothered to attend to in UrRu? SkekGra held himself steady for a while, until he was sure the UrRu was out of eye- or earshot, then heaved his recently-ingested landstrider snack up into the grass. 

<><><>

His triumph had been sullied, but SkekGra still attended to his plans, brought back meat and bones and hide to the other Skeksis, told them tales of his conquest. Certainly he didn’t tell about the UrRu. The UrRu’s words, the light refracted off the UrRu’s eyes, haunted his steps for many unum. He took his own words seriously. He renounced his other, and everything that was not himself; to compensate himself for his own weakness, for the fear and the memories that had tried to let themselves in all too conveniently, he focused ever more pointedly on what he was _now and alone_ , separate from the thing that had preceded that wrenching beginning. He would take himself and have himself and raise himself up, by any means.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra is perched on the pinnacle, an activity that’s become ever more of a challenge as his form ages and loses some of its prior wiry strength and wanes in its own ever-awkward grace, as mundane low-grade aches begin to inhabit the back and neck and feet. 

The nail, at least, has given little trouble, its lodgment negligibly impacted by the wearing of time upon the body; the nail, as it has for five hundred and more trine, close to six hundred trine maybe, tends to remain quiescent unless it’s jarred. It makes itself known regularly via coldness in the extremities, occasional disorientation and short-term forgetfulness, unwelcome tremors of the limbs and occasional difficulty breathing–but that has not changed or worsened with age. If anything, by this time, it has mitigated a bit, since the Skeksis has been dealing with these symptoms for most of his life and has a decent grasp on them.

So there he is perched loftily, quivering with the effort of holding on, watching to the east. Something is drawing his gaze southeast, something in the forest unseen in the distance, and then farther east, to where the hills north of Domrak lie beyond the protrusion of the Claw Mountains and beyond many leagues more of desert, and then northeast to Ha’rar obscured by distance and peaks. He can see nothing in these far-flung places, but something–something is happening in all of those places simultaneously, and happening in some realm beyond these spatial constraints. He feels as though he is waking up, as though the air is crackling with some boundless word that can only be roughly translated as _change_. 

“UrGoh,” he yells, a bit uselessly since UrGoh is possibly still in the house and won’t be able to hear him unless he screams bloody murder. He tilts his head back in the stagnant air (it is stagnant out here today, but it is moving just the same, in some other way), dripping sweat down the sides of his head and down the tendons of his neck, closes his eyes, still feels the change as clear as someone standing next to him and telling it. “UrGoh,” he tries again, in a whisper. “Do you feel this?”

“Yes,” UrGoh’s voice calls up from halfway up the steeply tilted stone slabs.   
  
  
“Careful, careful,” SkekGra frets as UrGoh climbs slowly upward, his progress even more awkward than SkekGra’s had been. They are both too old to be clambering around up here, yet UrGoh joins him in due time and they cling together, buffeted by the intangible stirrings of whatever is happening in Thra.   
  
  
“Do you think it’s beginning?” UrGoh whispers.

“It would seem so. Who’s speaking to us? Could Thra be speaking-–so loud-–to the likes of us?”

“You always doubt it. Who else would be speaking, outside of speech?”

SkekGra lays his chin on UrGoh’s head and peers along that far distant arc again, east to northeast to north. His heart is skipping like some small animal’s having run at length. Wonder and exultation stir in him, and something else, a dread. This was what they’d wanted, for the world to move, to rise out from under its burden, and now, assuming this feeling is true, now–if they might in fact get what they wanted–then their rest is over. Their often monotonous rest, all of its frustrations and all of its serenity, may be drawing to a close. SkekGra had thought he was ready for this chord to strike itself, impatient even, but now he can see the long days and long trine of his peace draining away. The triangular shape of his life is about to be disassembled. Already, he misses it. One rarely misses something mundane but important until it breaks or is stolen or is lost. But, they must stand at the ready, this they owe to Thra and all of Thra’s own. He tightens his grip on UrGoh, raises his head again to the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from this song: [“How Does It Feel?” -Roy Harper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtU9NIHbr10)
> 
> The POV of course prevented me stating it specifically, but at the end they're sensing Aughra hearing Thra's song again and her meeting the Gelfling in the Dreamspace.


	13. Makrak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we remember the Makrak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This and any subsequent chapters dealing with the time period of _Creation Myths_ will be taking that volume as optional canon, to be followed or folded or flouted as suits my purposes. 
> 
> I’m hoping these chapters won’t continue to take so long. Between the interesting times we’re experiencing, and having a lot of trouble pulling this together until I realized the Makrak stuff needed to be given free rein to become its own chapter, I was stuck for quite a bit there.

They attempt to prepare for the arrival of Gelfling. Whatever changed in the air several days prior suggested something moving among the clans. Perhaps, someone had solved the puzzle, had woken Lore.  
  
“We should take it easy on these urdrupes,” SkekGra says gamely. Which they do not do, too habituated to the things or too eager to allay anxiety of waiting around for something life-shaking whose manner and time of arrival is unknowable.

“We should practice the puppet show again,” says UrGoh, while they are both very high. Yes, good, something productive.   
  
Some of the puppets are quite old and need refurbishing, if not outright re-making from scratch. The puppets age much faster than the Skeksis and Mystic, despite seeing less day-to-day use than do the Skeksis and Mystic. The Gelfling puppet has already had most of its components replaced piecemeal, other than the hair. SkekGra unwraps it and groans. “Ah _ffff_ …fizzgig,” he saves the beginning of a more virulent curse. One must act a bit civilized, after all, Gelfling could show up at any minute!

“Good work,” comments UrGoh, straightening out wrinkles in the painted canvas backdrop.  
  
“I know. My restraint is admirable, especially considering this–sodding–Gelfling’s ear fell off yet again.”   
  
The Heretic rummages through a box of supplies for something to sew the errant ear back on. He finds a few half-finished puppets that are unrelated to _The True History of Thra._ “Hey. UrGoh. Can you _please_ stop putting your works-in-progress in the supply box–the supply box reserved _specifically_ for this project?”  
  
UrGoh casts the ceiling a mildly beleaguered glance and shuffles over, slower than ever (well, who could blame him, even SkekGra is slowing down with the weight of their many trine increasing). “Fine. Careful with that one–Makrak. Only Makrak I’ve made.”

“Makrak…” SkekGra delicately picks up the puppet his counterpart is indicating, pondering its wide-mouthed homely face. “That takes me back. How many hundreds of trine now…? We were still so new then…”

  
<>-<>-<>  


A tale reached the Castle of the Crystal–itself not particularly crystalline these days, but dark and fanged and dripping with innumerable details that confused the eye–of some new monster abroad in the region demolishing Podling villages. The crisis was conveniently timed for SkekSo, who had been speaking of the need to befriend the other peoples in Skarith. Gelfling, naturally, had some reservations about Skeksis, not understanding why their UrSkek patrons had gone quiet and why there seemed to be a new regime controlling the Castle, but this could all be dealt with patiently and subtly. Gelfling lifespans were brief, and they did not know what had really happened to the UrSkek. Befriending Gelfling, and, to a lesser extent, Podlings, could eventually lead to ruling them–benevolently, so that they would be glad to freely provide goods and services and acclaim. Ridding the little people of this new nuisance might be just the inroad they needed.

Debates volleyed through the main hall, where SkekSo had taken to sitting in an ornate chair as if he fancied himself some sort of royalty. No one had much to say about the chair to SkekSo’s face, although some rumbled behind his back at the audacity of it. But then, SkekSo had been doing what he wanted in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were simply his due to lead them, from the outset. Some wanted to let the monsters, if such did exist, terrorize Gelfling and Podling alike. Some even wanted to go join in the fun, make their solipsism and the violence of their hearts known to all and sundry.  
  
“What good does that do us, SkekLach, in the long-term?” persisted SkekSo, rising from his chair and pacing among the others. “While I’m sure it would be decently rewarding to rain abuse on something larger than fizzgig or smarter than your phegnese, those rewards do not last. To convince the Gelfling that we mean them well and that they wish to serve us, that would be a lasting triumph which would reap dividends. If you waltz out and slaughter them, in their place will pop up other Gelfling clamoring for retribution. Indulging ourselves upon the sentient beings will render Skarith a conflict zone. So much for leisure travel. So much for what little trade we’ve managed to establish with them, so much for potential servants and subjects.”

“What about outside of Skarith, then?” wondered SkekLach, to a few growls of approval. 

“Hm,” SkekGra murmured. Hypothetically, it could be fun to travel far and wide, seeing new places, meeting new people, killing those new people in new ways if they weren’t useful or pliable left alive…

“Yes, outside of Skarith,” nodded SkekSo, apparently noting SkekGra’s piqued interest and glancing from SkekLach to him. “The more adventurous or bloodthirsty among you have the whole of Thra to play in. Kill, enslave, colonize, steal–It would be an interesting experiment, and in keeping with the ultimate goal.”

“We have an ultimate goal?” said SkekAyuk.

“Well, of course, our goal is to rule Thra,” SkekSo answered with a mild chuckle, as though he hadn’t just essentially declared himself the head of some nascent imperial project.

There were a few snickers, and then a moment of uncertain silence when SkekSo didn’t react in the slightest. 

“Who else should rule Thra?” SkekSil put in. “What else do Skeksis deserve, but to rule Thra?”

When put that way, it made the sort of ego-inflating sense that sometimes caused the Skeksis to erupt into stupid self-congratulatory cheers, as they did now. “To Skeksis rule!” “Lords of the Crystal, Lords of Thra!” 

  
SkekZok somehow managed to insinuate his talking into the chaos until he was talking and everyone else was quiet and listening. He did have a strange knack for that, though SkekGra found his speeches boring and pedantic. He held forth about the importance of a cosmic order above, an order that should mirrored upon the earth and which Skeksis were obligated to bring to the whole of Thra. SkekGra glanced at SkekLi, who, as he’d hoped, pulled just the faintest _will he never shut up_ expression. Trying to keep a straight face in the midst of SkekZok’s declamations at least made them less boring. SkekGra shot SkekLi another glance, the latter quirking a brow and making just the slightest _you are dead if you start cackling in the middle of SkekZok’s special moment_ motion across the side of his throat with one talon. SkekGra bit his tongue. 

“…and, being wise, you also have perceived the deep need to etch these lines and arcs across the face of Thra, Highness,” pontificated SkekZok, which got everyone’s attention. 

A phlegmy growl emanated from SkekShod. “What? What is this? Who decided Skeksis need a king? Aren’t we all to be _rulers_ of _Thra_?”

SkekSo’s head snapped toward the dissenter, a cold and truly alarming spark in his pale eyes. “Skeksis are superior. _Order_ is superior. _Skeksis_ need _order._ Are you questioning the will of Skeksis?” 

SkekShod’s face evinced a bit of trepidation, but he stood forth nonetheless, snarling openly. “Since when does fucking _SkekZok_ speak for Skeksis? There are exactly sixteen of–”

The staff SkekSo had taken to toting around came down hard on SkekShod’s head, just above his eyes. The latter reeled, those standing nearest him jumping back in surprise. It wasn’t uncommon for Skeksis to physically tussle with teeth and talons, but striking another with any sort of object was novel. The staff was slightly curved and slightly pointed at its end. It caught SkekShod again, below the chin, opening a swift red furrow along the underside of his jaw. SkekShod crouched, gaping in consternation, dripping on the flagstones from the torn flap of skin.

“I find it appalling–” SkekSo huffed, “that you should speak of your peers with such disregard. I ask _you–_ What makes _you_ think your opinion is worth more than SkekZok’s?”

“That’s not what I said!” protested SkekShod, his voice shaking with ire and craven dread. SkekZok, SkekSil, and SkekVar had all sidled closer to SkekSo. 

“Oooh,” whispered SkekEkt, “is there going to be a–”

“Shh, not now,” SkekAyuk muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“Why,” SkekSil wondered, his head craned toward SkekShod while shooting the rest a wily darting glance, “should Skeksis not have king? Suns are not all same size, moons not same brightness, mountains not all same height. Everything has place.” 

And, of course, SkekSil’s place would be one of importance if he played his cards right. The fellow was slimy, no doubt about it. Plus, his voice was fucking unbearable, not to mention his speech patterns (SkekLi had commented in private that SkekSil’s odd grammatical constructs must be modeled on Aughra’s, with the same tendency to slip in and out of registers for emphasis). 

“All on Thra has its place, mmmmh?” SkekSil continued, on a roll, pacing slowly. “Gelfling, Podling, landstrider, armalig, crawlie… Maybe, Skeksis do not just need king. Thra needs– _Emperor_.”

There was a shifting as of tall grass in a slow wind, almost imperceptible, others edging toward the group around SkekSo and away from SkekShod. SkekGra went along with the shift, moved not by active agreement so much as the fact that he had nothing to gain by opposition. SkekSo already had the most support concentrated around him, the most sheer willpower, and it would be stupid to run afoul of him without a damn good reason. Given that all SkekGra wanted was to rove about at will, extracting knowledge or innards or whatever else his inquisitiveness might fancy from the creatures of Thra, such trifling castle details as King or Emperor weren’t overly important to him anyway.

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra’s hands are shaking as he holds the Makrak puppet, but he can’t be sure it isn’t just the habitual recurrent tremor. Could be the cold sense of culpability seeping into him that’s causing it. Probably both.  
  
“Here.” He hands it off to UrGoh.

  
  
The Mystic’s thumb brushes the back of the Skeksis’ hand gently as the Makrak is transferred to him. “Something wrong?”

“You–helped broker a peaceable end to that whole affair.”

“Yeah. I never saw you at the talks.”  
  
“Indeed. SkekSo asked us whose UrRu the meddling blue one was. I was like–” SkekGra raises a timid claw, imitating the mortification of his past self. “–’Umm, that’d be me.’ And SkekSo goes, ‘You are recused from further involvement in this matter.’”

UrGoh smirks at the exaggerated imitation of the Emperor’s inflections and facial expression. “I see. He was worried a clash might break out between us?”

“That, or he was worried you’d actually have a redeeming influence on me.” SkekGra lays his chin on UrGoh’s shoulder. “Imagine that.”

“Imagine that,” echoes UrGoh, leaning the side of his face into the SkekGra’s, still looking at the little puppet in his hands. “But, he said–’recused from _further_ involvement’…?”

“Yeah. There’s–” SkekGra draws back, looking studiously into the supply box to avoid looking at the UrRu. “You know about most of the things I did. There’s one I never mentioned, even after all this time. I couldn’t–-I’m sorry, I didn’t have the–-the grit to tell what I did. I was your mirror, with Makrak. There were two different groups of them wandering around. The Mystics and Raunip never met or heard tell of the other one…”

<>-<>-<>

SkekVar and SkekZok were dispatched to the Gelfling, to offer Skeksis’ aid against the monsters and broach the subject of an…alliance with them. SkekUng and SkekGra were dispatched, separately, to search for the creatures or any sign of them. SkekUng brought along SkekLach; the two would cross SkekMal’s current hunting grounds in their reconnoiter, hopefully enlisting his help. 

SkekGra brought along SkekOk and SkekLi. Half the court laughed heartily at the idea of bringing the two scrawniest people in the Castle out on such an expedition. SkekGra waved them off impatiently. “We’re not off to a pitched battle, you parasite-ridden shitstains, we’re on a mission of discovery. Brains can be of great benefit to such an endeavor, but I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that.”  


SkekOk seemed none too eager to participate, but SkekGra had been vested with the authority of the newly-throned Emperor, so along he came, removing and cleaning his spectacles repeatedly as they set out on a trio of phegnese. They bore toward the nearest Podling village said to have been ransacked by the monsters. The weather was very pleasant, the breeze wafting the smell of grass around their faces. SkekLi sang an impromptu ballad poking fun at them all, pretending the awkward flightless birds they rode were in truth beautiful and graceful steeds. SkekGra made up his own verse which attributed malevolent intentions to his and SkekOk’s phegnese, toward SkekLi’s; the third animal had done some unforgivable insult to its companions, and it was only a matter of time before they struck.

“Hopefully not while I’m still on the phegnese,” said SkekLi.  
  
“Actually, it will be much more entertaining if you are still on the phegnese,” pointed out SkekOk.

“Entertaining for you, sure.” SkekLi stood up melodramatically on the animal’s back, constantly shuffling to keep his balance in the plodding and teetering flow of its gait. “The sacrifices I make, to keep you barbarous lot entertained.”

“You’re going to fall off and get your skull crushed underfoot, SkekLi,” cautioned SkekGra.

“And I will die bringing song and laugher to one of the most esteemed of our kind.” SkekLi bowed in SkekGra’s direction, making his footing even more precarious for a moment. “Oh, and to SkekOk, too, I suppose.”

“Hmmph,” huffed SkekOk.

<><><>

The village was indeed demolished. Podlings had all fled, and had not yet dared return. They would have precious little to return to. Their small homes were either crushed, or strewn about along with their erstwhile inhabitants’ furniture and personal effects. A few domesticates, left behind in the panic, wandered around bawling to be milked or petted. 

SkekGra made slow circles around the piles of debris and the houses with crushed-in roofs. “They’re definitely very strong. They’re supposedly about our height. Must be bulkier though, even SkekMal would have trouble trashing this place to this extent.”

SkekOk was trailing after him nervously, close in his wake, while SkekLi had gotten distracted by something in one of the mangled houses. SkekGra sighed. “Quit breathing down my neck, SkekOk. They’re not coming back. They haven’t been known to come back to a place after ruining it.”

“What do you think they’re doing this for?” SkekOk shot a distasteful glance at a fizzgig that had trundled up to him and was whining against his leg. “Sheer wonton destruction? Are they stealing things?”

“Wouldn’t seem so. There’s still plenty of food here the Podlings weren’t able to take in their flight, nice woven rugs and tapestries, jewelry…If our targets were after earthly goods, this shit wouldn’t still be here.” SkekGra pocketed a couple gold chains that had half sprawled out of a quaint little jewelry chest which now lay broken on the dirt in the company of a fizzgig turd and a wagon wheel.

“They stole nothing because they didn’t find what they were looking for.” SkekLi skittered back over to them, excited by his own cleverness. “It’s all the same, in every one of these houses, a trail of soot leading away from the hearth. It’s like they burst into each house looking for something in the hearth, all but rolled around in it looking, then tracked soot everywhere and rioted when they didn’t find it.”

“Ah…” SkekGra paced around a couple of the nearest houses to confirm SkekLi’s observations. “See, this is why I bring you instead of SkekNa or some other lout. But what were they looking for in the hearths?”

“Fire,” said SkekOk, slightly sarcastically, but it gave all three of them pause.

“Say,” began SkekLi, “they are drawn to fire for some reason, they bust in to get at it, and in their enthusiasm they smother it. In their subsequent frustration, they destroy everything around them.”

“Someone would have to be pretty fucking enthusiastic to put out a fire with their own body and then scrabble around in the soot looking for it. More like–desperation, I think,” SkekGra mused.

“So they get cold easily. They are frantic for warmth, so much so that they extinguish what little fires they can find with their clumsy bulk.” SkekOk’s tone stated _such a tragedy_ , but there was an undercurrent of dark amusement. The bookish fellow’s sadism was subtle, but never very far from his reach.

“How could something that gets cold so easily, even in this nice balmy spring we’ve been having, ever have lived on Thra? They’re obviously not–what’s the word, SkekTek’s word–adapted to this environment. Where could they have come from?” SkekGra crouched to look at one of the large footprints, which had left a much deeper impression in the dirt than his own did. The creatures were very heavy.

“The Desert, I suppose.” SkekOk also leaned in to ponder the footprint. “But I’ve never, in all my readings concerning the Crystal Desert, encountered a roughly-Skeksis-height but bulky creature that moves in groups. And I have read dozens, if not hundreds of–”

“We know of your many letters,” SkekGra said hastily.

“Our dear historian and librarian is a many-lettered Skeksis, to be sure. These letters speak for themselves,” SkekLi appended, ingratiating.

“Mh,” SkekOk puffed up importantly.

“And, often, they speak _of_ themselves. A splendid array of letters indeed.”

“ _Eh,_ ” SkekOk deflated with a glare, realizing his self-aggrandizement was the butt of a joke.  
  
  
“So,” SkekGra resumed, “if they aren’t from the desert, where could–”

“There is fire, below the earth, within Thra,” offered SkekLi.

“Ah! Yes, that would make sense, if these creatures literally live in fire they must be tormented out in the cold, the air, the rain.” SkekGra’s mind started whirling with plans, and he laughed so giddily he became momentarily light-headed. “Let’s go find them. Talk to them. Offer them help.”

“Aren’t we to destroy them if we can, or call upon the rest to come help destroy them if we can’t, in order to help Gelfling?”

SkekGra patted SkekOk’s shoulder, heartily enough to almost knock the latter off balance. “Yes. We will offer help. And then, we will destroy them.”

<>-<>-<>

“And you say Skeksis don’t have friends. They were clearly your friends.” 

“ – _That_ is your take-away from this, UrGoh?”

“Well, so far. Granted, you’re not done telling it yet.” 

“Yes, not done telling about me and my _friends_ going on a killing spree. The very creatures you were so eager to help. You’ll hate me when I’m done.”

“Stop that.” UrGoh shuts the lid of the supply box with a thump. “Look at me. When have I ever hated you?”   
  
SkekGra, hunched over a bit, looks up at UrGoh reluctantly and says with faint petulance, “Never. But–I told you, long time ago, I didn’t want to keep any secrets from you. This one, I couldn’t bear to bring up. I mean, I would have, had you specifically asked me, ‘By the by, SkekGra, did you ever do anything awful involving Makrak?’ but since you didn’t–”

UrGoh reaches over with one of his auxiliary hands and clamps SkekGra’s beak shut. “I get it. Past is gone, present is upon us. We’re talking about it now, so…” 

_  
_< >-<>-<>

SkekGra, SkekLi, and SkekOk tracked the creatures past two more ruined Podling settlements, and found a group of about twelve of them, taking what rest they could on a hillock of sun-warmed boulders and howling miserably. The sounds might have been taken for anger, had the trio of Skeksis not made a reasonable guess at their plight. They were indeed around Skeksis height, but massive, and their hides appeared almost to be made of stone or of thick leather coated in mineral dust. Some of the stout bodies seemed to have some kind of simple armor strapped over their backs. All limbs and digits were thick and strong. The wide mouths had sharp teeth. Ugly bastards, to be sure, and probably not to be trifled with even though they were clearly disoriented and weakened by the hostile environment they’d found themselves in. 

The Skeksis stayed at some distance, watching for a time. Two or three of the creatures would often huddle together as if for warmth, but sitting still seemed to be painful for them as well, and they would break apart and resume toddling around on the rocks and emitting their bellowing yowls.  
  
“Let’s go talk to them,” SkekGra decided at last.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just stay right over h–”

“Come on, SkekOk, we need you to take notes. You’re the only one around here who knows shorthand.”

“ _Notes?_ On what exactly? We don’t even know their language.”

“Note whatever is useful to note, imbecile. ‘Shard’s sake, I know you’re smarter than this. Note if they seem to have a leader, their behaviors, their words if we learn any of them–”

“You want me to learn their words? Doubtless they’ll tear me apart first.” SkekOk poked a bony, shaky finger at SkekGra accusingly. “This is not my province, you up-jumped landstrider-butcher.”

“Pfft, as if you don’t drool and feast as greedily as the rest when I bring landstrider haunch back to the Castle. Don’t worry, SkekOk, you don’t need to learn their words. SkekLi will do that.”

“SkekLi will thank you not to order him about, cretin.” SkekLi glared, but something flickered briefly in his dark eyes, as it sometimes did, more often did of late, that left the glare without any fangs. 

_  
_< ><><>

SkekGra, crouched close to SkekOk, could feel the other trembling as he dutifully scratched things down in a journal. SkekOk hadn’t seemed convinced that any useful data could be extracted from this interaction, but now the writing was evidently the only thing keeping him from a panic. The creatures, still on the rocks above them and about ten paces away from them, peered down with unreadable expressions. They all looked rather crazed, which was probably partly due to bugging eyes and other odd facial features, and partly due to being generally driven mad by intractable pain, but they listened. They restrained their noise, emitted no more than profoundly uncomfortable grumbles, while one of their number attempted to establish a passable patois with SkekLi. SkekGra had approached the creatures first– _Makrak_ , SkekLi had extracted almost immediately–with theatrically humble and non-threatening gestures, but SkekLi was the one they warmed to. He had an uncanny grasp on languages, on body language in lieu of words, and was small and non-threatening as Skeksis went. 

SkekGra watched and listened with keen interest and something like admiration as SkekLi ran through a number of tongues spoken in Skarith, and some that were no longer spoken just in case the Makrak had had some contact with the world above far earlier in their history, did his best to imitate some of their words with his much-differently-shaped mouth. SkekLi patted the earth, indicated himself and his companions, then dug a small hole with one talon and pointed into it and then indicated the Makrak with a questioning grunt. The Makrak nodded and nodded.  
  
SkekLi, seated on the ground a few paces ahead of them, glanced back at SkekOk and SkekGra. “They’re from below, as we thought.” He turned back again, the brown-and-black mottled feathers on the back of his next fluffing out a bit with delight at his own success, and resumed an exchange of words. It seemed he and the Makrak were finding words, regardless of which language it was, that could be mutually recognized and mutually spoken across their differing vocal anatomies. “–that means ‘earthquake,’ write that down, SkekOk…”

They must have sat there for several hours. The suns were moving from afternoon toward evening, and anxious yowls began to erupt sporadically from the clustered Makrak as the light and warmth waned. SkekLi said something placating to his interlocutor, patched together from four or five different languages, bowed to it, then turned back to the other Skeksis. “Won’t get much more out of them as the dark comes on. I think I’ve got the bones of the story. They live and work in the molten fires, deep under. A number of trine ago, there was a great earthquake-”

All three shared uncomfortable glances. That had happened when the Crystal was broken by one of the Skeksis (who _had_ that been? It was all too murky in the memory to be sure.), Thra shook itself in protest as through Skeksis could be shaken off like fleas.

“–and it tilted their caves, draining their fires away into some other channel unknown to them. Before they could find where the fire had gone, the roofs of the caves began to tremble and fall, and so they ran. They ran with rocks falling at their heels, many were crushed. By the time they stopped running, they were in a cave that opened into the lands above, and the way back down behind them had been blocked. They stayed in that cave and slept for the ensuing ten trine or so–this, it was difficult to understand, apparently they can go into a deep and long stasis, but after a while they need to wake up to replenish themselves. They couldn’t go back to sleep because they had nothing to eat and it was too cold. So they came out into the world, and they found the night frigid, the slightest breezes like fire licking would be to us, the rain tormenting. They were driven into a frenzy and happened to stumble into a village, where they found fire, but not nearly enough. They say they didn’t intend to harm anyone, but were out of their minds with pain.”

“Harrowing indeed,” remarked SkekOk, now fully inhabiting his role as recorder and scribbling onto the pages with ferocity. “They should consider themselves lucky we’ll be putting them out of their misery.”  
  
SkekLi looked sad, and for a hideous moment SkekGra wondered if he might be having some attack of conscience, but all he said was, “They’ve been fun to talk to.”

“Worry not, if SkekSo sends me to the far corners of Thra, you’ll be my translator. You’ll talk to many fun people, before I kill them. Maybe you can keep talking to them, if we can convince them to partake of our empire more peaceably.”

SkekLi’s beak gaped a bit in a vindicated grin. “Here is a Skeksis who understands my value.” It was true that many of them were dismissive of SkekLi, fancying him a jester unfit for any deep conversation or regard. SkekGra and SkekOk, at any rate, knew better.  
  
“Intelligence often goes unseen by the stupid,” remarked SkekOk, and the three shared in a moment of smugness.  
  
“All right, so, on with the plan,” SkekGra resumed, determined that “team brains” should outdo SkekUng’s “team brute strength.” “Tell Makrak to find dry branches, brush, they could even uproot small trees. There’s that gravel beach by the river, just a few miles away, have them bring it all over there. It will be well worth their toil. We’ll set up a ring of bonfires all around them, nice and cozy.”

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra rises, old joints creaking in the process, and paces slowly around among the puppets and stage sets. “I’m too fucking high to talk about this. The walls have a bunch of eyes right now, they’re all watching me–judging me–” 

“The only one here is me.” 

“ –and, I mean, rightly so?”   
  
“You were very young when you did these things. Deeps breaths. You’re working yourself into a panic. Sit down.” 

“I will not sit down! Don’t look at me like that. I don’t deserve to be comforted, for something like this.” SkekGra is leaning on the staff he’s taken to carrying about these past hundred trine or so like some kind of ceremonial walking stick. He bangs the butt end of it on the floor for emphasis.

UrGoh sighs, seeming both sad and exasperated, seating himself with painstaking slowness on one of the benches. “I don’t know anymore…is this about your shame, or your pride?” 

“I–” SkekGra stops with his beak half open. “I have no fucking idea.”   
  
“You’ve…” The Mystic regards the Skeksis with a long, searching stare, making the other fidget uncomfortably. “ …become proud of your shame.” 

Well, shit, UrGoh’s right as usual, isn’t he? SkekGra isn’t sure whether becoming proud of one’s shame should, itself, make one feel proud, or ashamed. He stands shaking his head, not in denial, but as if to rid the fog and confusion from his skull. The dull pounding in his brain that started up along with his tale increases in force, and his extremities start going a bit numb. He hisses under his breath, resuming his pacing amid the pins-and-needles sensation in his feet.   
  
UrGoh changes his tack. “All right. I’ll give you no comfort, if that’s what you want. But, you will _tell_ me.” 

<>-<>-<>

SkekGra and SkekOk stood on the narrow path that led to the top of the dam, a thing constructed by some lost UrSkek art out of what seemed to be one massive vertical plane of gleaming greyish-red stone. They watched the Makrak camp some thirty meters below them. The ungainly-looking folk were milling around among the big circle of bonfires on the broad gravel beach. The grimaces on their faces had eased, as had most of their noises. The river, judiciously spit out by some mechanism that drew the reservoir waters on the other side through the dam’s bowels, made a continual loud rushing and shushing sound.

SkekOk eyed the curled, aged rolls of paper he’d found in one of the control centers near the top of the dam. He’d been poring over the diagrams for hours, while SkekGra clambered around noting every detail of the terrain and SkekLi talked with the Makrak. “We’d be better off with SkekTek here, but I think I have the gist of these. Did you know, apparently, this dam used to create some source of power somehow? Out of the water itself!”

“Fascinating. Maybe Skeksis can figure that out, someday. Our present task should be considerably simpler, yes?”   
  
“Yes, I believe, if we want it to release just a bit on one side, we would go to this control center, here–and there’s this series of levers and cranks, apparently they take two to operate–” 

SkekLi came trotting up the path. “They’re reasonably settled, nice and warm. They’re worried about–how they’re going to keep all of these fires fueled, or whether it will rain. I hadn’t the heart to tell them–” He grinned, grasping one talon tragically to his narrow chest. “–they needn’t worry for long.” 

The three Skeksis cackled, slightly more restrained than they might have been if no one else were about, if they were in the Castle with only their own for company. Headfeathers bristling and quivering in conspiratorial comradery, they made their way to the control room indicated by SkekOk. 

SkekLi watched out the narrow slit of a window while the other two began puttering and poking at the long-unused machinery in the small room. “They are–very grateful,” SkekLi commented as he stood on tiptoe to see out, the end of his tail twitching.   
  
“Charming.” SkekGra yanked on a stubborn lever until it gave way with a thump and a screech. Other noises woke in response, clatterings and creakings, some of which sounded like they came from deep within the dam far below them. The short, whiskery feathers around his nose bristled, detecting a change of some sort, in the air currents or perhaps the humidity. “It will be quite simple for them to repay us. A little bath, not much to ask really.”   
  
A few wrestings-into-motion of other long-slumbering bits of machinery later, SkekLi squawked in excitement. “There it goes, it’s opening, you’ve done it–Ah! The steam! By all light that’s ever refracted–”

SkekGra pushed his colleague out of the way eagerly, watching the vicious torrent of water pouring out where a section of the dam had peeled itself aside, flooding the beach, already up to the knees of the beset Makrak. They attempted to flee, but the chill water from the reservoir, fed by snowmelt off the mountains, incapacitated most of them quickly. They staggered and screamed, some falling immediately, others crawling or rolling onward in a frantic attempt to outrun the rising water. As SkekLi had exalted, the steam was prodigious, rising both from the bonfires that were rapidly being extinguished and from the bodies of the Makrak themselves.  
  
The three Skeksis bolted from the control room and hurtled down the path, wading in little more than ankle-deep at the edge of the flood where the depth and current were insufficient to drag them off balance. Unsheathing swords and knives, they took down the Makrak who managed to make it that far, the creatures’ very skin hissing and steaming, their eyes wild with anguish and the fury of betrayal. SkekGra laughed uncontrollably. This was what he had been waiting for, this chance to grip the life of something with a mind, with a language, something that looked at him with words swimming behind its eyes as he dragged that life from it. He had wondered if that would change his hunger for blood, if the thing he killed was something that could have spoken to him–and indeed, the first one did try to speak to him, screamed at him in its language that he knew nothing of, maybe cursing him or maybe demanding an answer for his betrayal, as he gouged into one of the frantic eyes with a rapier–and yes, it did change it. It made it stronger.

<>-<>-<>  
  
“SkekLi made a song about it on our way back. Beautiful voice, as far as Skeksis go. We–brought the head of one of them back to SkekSo. Emperor was very pleased with…with our results, but also he had us go back immediately, weight them all down with stones, drag them out into the river and sink them to hide what we’d done. While we were on our way back to the Castle, a message had apparently come from SkekVar, that a battle with another set of Makrak had been pre-empted by a small party including ‘Aughra’s nosy brat and some meddling blue UrRu.’ Skeksis needed to appear ready to defend Gelfling with war, but also ready to accept another solution, whichever garnered the most trust. So we stood down when you and Raunip proposed to resettle those…those refugees, really…And we hid those bodies, those people that we–that _I–_ massacred-–And none other than the Skeksis ever knew about it.”

SkekGra stands in the doorway, the warmly-colored and now deeply frayed and faded streams of cloths that curtain it shifting around him in the wind. He stares over the desert, the flicking colors of the streamers twisting and shivering in and out of the edges of his vision. 

UrGoh is standing beside him, too stooped for his face to appear sidelong along with the colors. Although UrGoh, as he has professed, knows full well that SkekGra’s past is nothing he’s proud of, there’s still a sort of quiet and impotent anger coming off the Mystic in the way he breathes. SkekGra doesn’t blame him in the least. Nearly six hundred trine is a long time to keep a secret, and although UrGoh is well versed in the Conqueror’s sullied past, this one probably did come as something of a shock. UrGoh had, all this time, been ignorant of the mirrored incident, that his counterpart had harmed Makrak viciously and remorselessly while UrGoh himself had been helping them.

UrGoh sighs quietly, an almost creaking sound. Perhaps part of him still wishes to comfort SkekGra in his remorse. Part of him-–does not wish to, not right now. In any case, SkekGra doesn’t wish it either. “SkekGra the Conqueror was a blight upon Thra,” the UrRu says quietly at length. “Even his memory is cruel. If it’s SkekGra the Heretic’s lot to suffer this alone, he will find warm tea in the house when the storm has passed.”   
  
UrGoh leaves SkekGra standing where he is, as the evening draws in and the wind becomes colder. The streamers rustle against his neck and face, the brightness of their colors going grey with the departing light. SkekGra, too, has gone quite grey, with the departing of all these trine. He stands in the cold, in his own shadow, until there has been enough of it, and passes back through the colors into light.


	14. Paint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of facepaint and fashions (or, lack thereof) and preparations.

SkekGra peers at the mirror. He’s not used to his own reflection anymore. He sees UrGoh far more than he sees his own particular face. Between UrGoh, UrVa, and UrLii, the only people he’s really spoken to since his banishment, he is more accustomed to UrRu faces. Strange, that he’d thought the Mystics were kind of hideous and quite stupid-looking, before, and now he perceives himself as something of an awkward anomaly, all bone and tooth. 

The semi-permanent dyes he’s been applying a couple times an unum, a habit initiated upon SkekEkt’s insistence so long ago (after all, the Conqueror had been understandably reluctant to _accessori_ ze _,_ to add dangling bits and pieces to himself that might catch on branches or claws or points, but _something_ had to be done to offset that monotone complexion and sunken midfacial region), have faded. There’s not really a pragmatic reason to continue this custom, being that SkekGra isn’t exactly bustling about near the hub of the Skeksis court anymore, but he keeps it up for reasons of his own. He’d changed the design significantly after settling in at the Circle of the Suns, long after the old paint had all worn off, as a reimagining of himself–and as a defiance, a reappropriation, to keep doing what they’d taught him to do, but in a different way. He’d partially changed the colors too, replacing the deep blue-green with white. This is important, the retention of the tool, of the habit, for subversive purposes. It reminds him why he left, why he’s here, why he and UrGoh did all that they did, and what may be still to come.  
  
SkekGra tilts his head on one side, blinks, squints, opens his eyes wide and tilts his head to the other side. “Thinking of changing this up.”

“To what?” UrGoh is only half paying attention to the Skeksis’ ramblings, staring out the window in a cloud of smoke and keeping his own monologue internal.

“Not quite sure. This is–severe-looking, the angles. Kept that from the Skeksis. The colors, red, too bloody, very dramatic with the white in a martyr sort of way, that part definitely not from Skeksis. I was in quite the phase when I came up with this, wasn’t I?”

“Well–Given what happened, it…wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate…”

“Mmh.”

“And don’t call it a ‘phase.’ It was shattering, for us both.”

“True, yes. Renewing.”

“Resonant.”

“Refractive.”

“Redemptive.”

“Regurgitated.”

“Shut up.”

  
<>-<>-<>

Skeksis began to think quite highly of themselves. They lived, after all, in a castle. They were colonizing the lands around them. Gelfling had begun to answer to them as lords. Other, more obscure and less “civilized” folk either bent the knee or died quietly while Gelfling heads were turned. It was only fitting that Skeksis should have more elaborate garments, accessories– _regalia–_ befitting their status as Lords of the Crystal. SkekEkt, who had a flare for form and color and other such matters, and a new title of Ornamentalist, busied himself and a crew of Gelfling tailors and Podling laborers, to attend to this business.

Most of the Skeksis were excited at the prospect of new finery to some degree, although SkekSa shook her head in bemusement and conveniently disappeared as she was wont to do for even longer periods than SkekGra did, and SkekTek and SkekLi seemed indifferent. SkekGra had mixed sentiments. No harm in looking more imposing, more dashing, or whatnot, as long as he could still wear what he liked outside the Castle and get it filthy with blood and dirt.

The first feast where everyone was expected to be fashionably garbed seemed to be going off without a hitch, as Skeksis began to arrive at table. They milled around with the usual posturing, compliments, jabs, but all somehow exaggerated, as though the weighty fabric and ornaments had given them silent permission to be–even more of themselves than they already were.   
  
“Yes, it does bring out the color of your eyes,” SkekEkt, who was flitting around with an air of authority, congratulated SkekGra (or rather, congratulated himself) with regard to the deep crimsons and peacock blues and bronze accents the Conqueror had ended up with. “Really makes them pop.” 

“Mmh. Thank you. I do hope there won’t be any actual eye-popping on this occasion,” SkekGra volunteered. SkekNa, who was already a bit deep in his cups, slapped him jovially on the shoulder at this and declared, “The evening is still young!” 

SkekLi was one of the last to arrive, apparently minded that the evening should not, in fact, go off without a hitch. He could be shameless and incredibly obnoxious when he wanted to make a statement. The present statement was evidently to do with the new finery, as he had not only foregone it but was as naked as the day they’d come screaming into being save for some odd headwrap he’d fashioned out of a dead muski. The muski was ornamented with a goodly amount of jewels, drapes, paints, and bangles.

The room slowly went quiet. “Oh, _this_ fucking jester,” someone finally ventured, to renewed noise. Some chortled with amusement, others were decidedly offended.

“Please, get him out of here,” the Ornamentalist fretted. “SkekLi, I don’t venture to imagine what is going on in your brainmeat, but–Oh no, _don’t_ you dare sit down, I just had these chairs re-upholstered!” 

SkekLi, looking for all the world like he had no idea what the fuss was about, paused in the act of pulling his chair out. “I thought it was Skeksis that had recently been re-upholstered. I thought, also–my lord, forgive me if I misspeak, but I thought that chairs were made for Skeksis to use. Am I wrong? If, in fact, Skeksis are made for the use of chairs, then I really must reevaluate my whole existence.” 

Well shit, that was almost a good point. SkekGra, along with several others, burst out laughing. 

SkekSil whined loudly. “Friend SkekLi does not understand basic table manners, yes?”

“One can sit in a chair,” said SkekEkt, bristling, “without making a needless vile mess of it.” 

“Ah. I see. I apologize. This muski is beautifully garbed in the latest fashion, and will do great honor to your chairs, and your chairs to it, I’m sure.” SkekLi removed his carcass headwear with a flourish and hung it over the back of the chair.

The Emperor in his new clothes had been silent and impassive throughout. He now narrowed his eyes at SkekLi with a hint of distaste. “I see we have a–Satirist on our hands. For future reference, Skeksis are to attend meals with clothes on.” 

“Of course, sire.” Satirist inclined his head deeply (perhaps, thought SkekGra, partly to hide the smirk on his beak). “Does this same stricture also apply to other events, say, diplomatic envoys?” 

SkekVar growled loudly. “Show a bit more regard when speaking to your Emperor.” 

“This is unmindful and uncouth. He should be punished,” suggested SkekZok, with his patent leer.

SkekGra half rose from his seat. “‘Scuse me. You’re all aware that the–Satirist is…eccentric. I don’t think he understands what he’s doing. This night is cold. Emperor, permit me to take him on an excursion outdoors, so that he might–understand the merits of clothing.” 

“ _Thank_ you,” hollered SkekEkt, who might normally be pushing for a dramatic punishment himself, but clearly wanted this particular dinner to proceed with minimal interruption. 

SkekSo shrugged, either not terribly affronted by SkekLi’s stunt or hoping to minimize its impact by indifference. “As you like. Feel free to chew on him a bit too.” 

SkekGra grabbed SkekLi by the scruff, grabbed an unopened bottle of wine in his other hand, and hustled them out of the room. 

  
<>-<>-<>

  
“Sorry, UrGoh. You’re right. I’ve been thinking about–about those times a lot, too.” SkekGra turns from the mirror and creeps across the loft to the open window, not nearly so lithe as he’d once been in his quadrupedal movements, and bunts his head up under UrGoh’s arm to look out over the desert with him.   
  
UrGoh pets the Skeksis’ ruff, now gone a dull slate grey, with one hand, still scanning the land with their spyglass. The Mystic had traded for that at rather a hefty price a couple hundred trine ago, a goodly portion of one season’s harvest of their specially-cultivated strain of urdrupes. Those particular urdrupes had some properties of stimulants rather than depressants, and had become a favorite of SkekGra’s. “Yes. The bell-birds are finally coming home to roost.”

“Bell-birds are…”

UrGoh sighs.  
  
“Yes, I know, figure of speech,” SkekGra amends, a bit impatiently.   
  
“And yet, dead things may still come home.”   
  
The Heretic shivers, torn between annoyance and a genuine sense of foreboding. “I never know anymore how serious to take these riddles you–”

“Shh.” UrGoh pokes his snout out of the window a bit more, training the spyglass on something moving. “Crystal skimmer…Far off, headed north, bit northeast maybe.”

“So? We see those at distance, fair amount. Makes sense. Desert belongs to Dousan, not us.”

“Dousan belong to Desert, SkekGra.”

“Yes. Right. So do we, for now.”

“Long time.”

“Long time,” the Heretic concurs.

UrGoh lowers the glass and leans his face against SkekGra’s. Thra, he looks old, such deep creases under his eyes, spirals more deeply incised–Not less beautiful, though. “This skimmer…Different, somehow.”

  
<>-<>-<>

  
“You’re going to get yourself seriously fucking hurt one of these days,” the Conqueror berated when they had put one corridor and one flight of stairs between them and the company.

  
“Conqueror, don’t you know who you’re talking to?” SkekLi returned brightly, but not without a certain dark undertone. “I’m not important enough to get hurt.” 

“Don’t count on that, Satirist.” SkekGra shook the other by the shoulder while still striding briskly toward the nearest egress. “What in the fiery pits were you thinking?”

“You’re no simpleton, you know what I was thinking.”

“That these fancy clothes are all landstrider shit?”

“Well, yes, that’s the blunt end of it. Could you kindly remove your claws from my back?”

“Pfft. Got a lot of gall to even ask. I was given leeway to beat you, which I wouldn’t.” 

“What he said was that you could ‘chew on me.’” SkekLi craned his neck around, the better to cast the Conqueror a brief and unnervingly pointed side-eye.

“That’s called a figure of speech.” SkekGra brought them to a halt just around the corner from the door. It wouldn’t do for the Gelfling guards stationed there to see one Skeksis dragging another, naked, through the halls. The small contingent of Gelfling recently brought to serve in the Castle were vaguely aware that harsh and strange penalties sometimes occurred, and chalked it up to the lords dealing with lofty matters that must demand commensurate punishment when consequences were in order–but, _this_ would simply be undignified, not good for Skeksis’ image. SkekGra removed his blue-green feather-trimmed cloak and draped it around the Satirist’s shoulders. The shorter Skeksis was practically drowning in it. Good, maybe Gelfling wouldn’t notice he had nothing else on under it (and actually it–looked rather nice on him?). 

SkekGra marched SkekLi past the guards, ignoring their obeisance completely, and yanked the cork out of the wine bottle with one talon when they were some distance out along the bridge. He took a large gulp and passed it to the Satirist, saying in a beleaguered tone, “What if I hadn’t gotten you out of that? Would–whatever they decided to do–have been worth it?”   
  
  
<>-<>-<>

  
“You think this skimmer has to do with–us?” SkekGra murmurs.

“Depends what you mean…by ‘us’.”

“Fuck’s sake, UrGoh.”

UrGoh appears beleaguered and makes no audible response.

“Fine, fine. That’s a ‘yes,’ but you don’t want to presume upon Thra and say as much.” SkekGra’s head suddenly bolts upright, knocking the top of his beak against the underside of UrGoh’s chin. “We must prepare! Make sure nothing’s falling off the puppets, see to it all the set gears are greased-–”

UrGoh rubs his chin with a long-suffering expression. “We just did that. Two days ago.”

“Ah! Sweep, dust? Make sure there’s no drug paraphernalia hanging about?”

“Done. Except the last one.”

“I suppose you’re right. I’m…really high.”

“Yes, we know. Hopefully it’ll wear off by the time they get here.”   
  
“Of course, plenty of time still.” SkekGra shakes his head and fluffs up his neckfeathers. “Not enough time for new paint design though. I’ll touch this one up. Looks like shit right now.”

UrGoh grabs the Skeksis just for a moment, very seriously, as SkekGra makes to turn back to the business at hand. “You never look like shit.”  


“You’re biased, my heart.” SkekGra nuzzles his counterpart’s snout. “But, I mean, it’s flaking off. I look like some wrecked lunatic who’s been living in the desert about six hundred trine and hardly gives a care.”

“That’s...”

“Accurate.”

“It’s also fine,” UrGoh says indefatigably. 

“For you, maybe. And it’s very good of you. Bear in mind though, we’ve got Gelfling coming, maybe, hopefully?”

“Right.”

  
<>-<>-<>

“Oh, at worst they would have scalded me with something hot from the kitchens.” SkekLi’s voice was flippant, but again plagued by some pensive undercurrent. He also drank straight from the bottle and passed it back. “Are we to not question anything? Shall we mindlessly follow, like fizzgig on a lead? Is this your assessment of our nature and our purpose?”

SkekGra glanced at the other with mixed admiration and consternation. “Well–no, I mean, don’t bloody put words in my mouth, but–this was just _clothes_ , SkekLi. Choose your fucking battles.” 

“I don’t frequent the literal field of battle, do I? If I do a thing, that might put myself in jeopardy, it’s for my own reasons, which differ from yours.”

“Fair enough.” SkekGra hissed under his breath and finished off the bottle, which they’d been handing back and forth rather rapidly. “It’s not my business, anyway, if you care to get yourself hurt.” 

“Hmh, but you’ve made it your business, haven’t you?” They had passed over the bridge and into the highland grasses. The wind rifled through the grass and through feathers and fabric, as if to conveniently emphasize SkekLi’s point: “You even lent me your cloak. You’re right, it’s cold out here. The Conqueror is merciful.” 

“Never say that of me, you little fucker. That was to get you past Gelfling without us looking completely freakish,” snapped SkekGra, trying to ignore the fact that SkekLi had also inched in closer to him as if for warmth. 

“Right. So you want it back?” SkekLi said merrily, making to undo the clasp.

“No, um, that’s all right. You’ve probably gotten it filthy anyway. SkekEkt was right–shocker there, but–he’s right, it’s unsanitary, to just go around–”

“You think I’ve shit your cloak in all of five minutes? Or–done something else to it?” SkekLi threw his head back and laughed as they walked (or staggered tipsily, rather) through the grass.

“Bloody shard, what is your malfunction? I just mean it’s just–not done.” SkekGra rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “People shouldn’t be sitting on fancy chairs with their junk out. I wallow in guts when I’m abroad, and even I can understand that basic concept. And furtherfuckingmore–Look, what would happen if you were to–start dripping, at the dinner table, for all of Thra to see?”

SkekLi stopped so abruptly that SkekGra nearly fell over in his own attempt to halt. “SkekGra, please.” The Satirist gave him a withering look, as if he were very stupid. “Who on earth gets aroused at the dinner table?”

SkekGra, disoriented by the chastising tone, tried unsuccessfully to recall if any such thing ever had actually happened to him. “It’s the _principal_ of the thing, SkekLi. What if, hypothetically–”

“You seem awfully interested in my hypotheticals,” the Satirist said crisply, starting to circle him, as graceful as it was possible for a drunk Skeksis to be. 

“Excuse me? Fuck you.”

“Oh?” SkekLi hissed, the moons’ light glinting off his eyes for a moment as he moved. “That a promise?”

SkekGra tried to keep up with the other’s pacing, his head spinning a bit. “It’s a figure of speech…” he began helplessly.

“What figures into your speech?”

SkekGra snarled and made a feint at SkekLi, snapping his beak closed on air as the other stepped back just out of reach. SkekLi was not only one of precious few sources of intelligent conversation, but completely batshit crazy and with no evident concept of fear despite his stature, which was admittedly a rather diverting suite of traits. He wasn’t quite sure when it had become a pretense that he merely intended to take Satirist on a walk just long enough to remove him from any potential outbreak of wrath in the Castle, but it clearly _had_ become a pretense at some point–and evidently quite a transparent one. “This–impropriety–is how you repay me for helping you?” SkekGra tried again, futilely.

“In what form would you prefer this–payment you require?”

“Your silence would suffice. Just shut your beak. Shut up.”

SkekLi craned his head in, canted severely to one side, and laughed in SkekGra’s face. “No.”

“You fucking muski, do you have any idea what I’m going to do you if you don’t stand down?”

“I can only hypothesize, you bloody cretin. Show me, if you can catch me.”

They ran, the grass hissing in the wind around them.

<>-<>-<>

“Sandstorm coming,” announces UrGoh, ducking back in from the porch.  
  
“Tall?” SkekGra responds automatically. They’re more than used to the sandstorms by now. The vertical reach of the storms doesn’t always extend to their lofty house. If it does, one needs to loose the ties on the broad and ungainly canvas sheet rolled up and secured to one side of the cave’s entryway, unfurl the thing across the entrance and secure it to bolts protruding from the wall on the opposite side of the door, to prevent an inundation of sand.   
  
“No, I think we’ll be fine.”

A small blessing. Dealing with the reinforcements to the doorway is a pain. They’d considered other options, early on–a tight thatch weaving, a wall of wooden posts with dried mud securing the gaps, some sort of stone-carved or kiln-fired bricks with a small egress. Ultimately they’d wanted to keep things simple, to disturb as little as possible what Thra had provided them with. This may have been stupid, and it may have been wise. That depends, of course, on whether trust is wise or stupid. The exiles had opted to trust Thra, which had given them a vision that demanded the renderings of themself strangers to their own kind, and that had also gifted them with each other–to trust Thra against elements, against foes. The Heretic’s uneasy early encounters with a couple of his fellow Skeksis notwithstanding, none had ever encroached upon them.   
  
SkekGra bustles around, stowing a few loose papers away just in case their assessment of the storm should prove wrong and the gritty wind should howl in upon them. That happens once in a great while. It had first happened while they were still camping on the hard floor of the barely–furnished cave shortly after their arrival. They’d woken to sand weighing the blankets down into the dips and blank spaces left by their sleeping forms, sneezing it out, and had shaken out the bedding on the porch in the dawn before carefully washing each other off with damp rags.

“Say…” SkekGra begins, creeping his way up the ramp to where UrGoh is looking out the window in the loft, “if that skimmer was related to–to something Gelfling…They would be here soon. But, the sandstorm would also waylay them, surely.”

“Maybe. Skimmer could ride above the storm. But, Dousan don’t like this place, so maybe they wouldn’t.” UrGoh’s expression grows more studied, almost avoidant, as he considers the blank desert and the light’s harshly dull refraction off the crystalline extrusions.  
  
“Why don’t they like it again?” presses the Skeksis, nudging the Mystic over a bit to also look out of the window, although he already knows.  
  
“They say…” UrGoh peers over at SkekGra with bright eyes, continuing a little reluctantly, “Death stoops over this place like a great bird circling far above.”

SkekGra can’t help but shiver, though he’s heard it numerous times before. Dousan don’t have the most fine-grained control over their dreamlike dialogue with death and time, from what he understands. This could be any death, long past or yet to come in a future where– _How_ can there be a future where he and UrGoh don’t inhabit this place? The Skeksis is gripped with a sense of desolation. Surely–surely, if circumstances permitted otherwise, they would not remain here indefinitely–? And yet…this place is _them._ His eyes dart around with a sudden quiet franticness, at the things they’ve built here, the items they’ve placed here, the stone enclosing them that was here long before them and will remain long after them. The colored glass shapes dangling in the window twist around slowly and idly, casting their colors into the chiaroscuro of the late afternoon peering into the house. SkekGra remembers all the times the stones awoke into swirling and bleeding patterns, while they lazed about together letting the urdrupes do their work, the swirls they incised into Lore, UrGoh grasping him with all arms the first time they faced the Breath of Thra (comforting him and refusing to allow him to flee, simultaneously).

What if everything changes now? Did they really seize advantage of all this time that was vouchsafed them? If this storm breaks, if they were not given time to prepare–! But no, they were given all the time in the world. No one can ever be prepared, as much as they think they are.  
  
SkekGra buries his face in UrGoh’s mane, shaking, urgent. “I love you. I love you.”   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The paint here is supposed to be something along the lines of henna or jagua, setting into the top layer of skin pretty intractably until the dead skin sloughs off, hence the semi-permanence.
> 
> I tried to fend SkekLi off at some point, but he made a very convincing argument that he could be a _foil_ for UrGoh, so I gave up trying to restrain him. Thra help me (and the Satirist).


End file.
